SMART Village: A model for Sustainable Community Development

Abstract

SMART village is a part of integrated technology transfer to promote participating roles in local community career development in harmony with village needs, their local contexts and following the living path principles of Thailand’s well-known self-sufficiency economy philosophy. The main concepts of this project are to promote outstanding performance of the communities, to bring about creative ideas in villager-self development and to solve entire loop of their own problems in planting, post harvest production, and marketing. In brief, the agricultural groups and occupational groups were set up which had impacts on sustainability, management by grouping, added product value, resources and conservation of soil, water, and forest, clean and green technology application to immunize community sustainability of basic infrastructure for the future with self-support. Keyword of SMART village stands for development model of Samoeng district. Such groups are as follows: 1) Bo-Kaew village for strawberry production; 2) Omlong village for stevia dry leaves; 3) Nga Maeng village for organic rice and seed production; 4) Mae-Tung-Ting Village for organic herbal tea production from dry leaves of moringa, mulberry, laurel-clock-vine which grows well in the community forest and 5) Technology transfer activities include establishing green shop for market promotion of organic agricultural product.