Alumni Entrepreneurs: an evening with Khun Mechai

Please join us on Wednesday, 8 February for the first in a series of AustralianAlumni presentations focussing on the achievements of Australian alumni entrepreneurs. In what is sure to be an inspirational presentation, Khun Mechai Viravaidya will discuss his innovative and enormously successful approaches to community and social development. A graduate of the University of Melbourne, Khun Mechai is perhaps not an entrepreneur in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, he has developed his own brand of world-leading social entrepreneurship which blends commercial success with community mindedness, individual responsibility and continual personal development.

Khun Mechai is an honorary Patron of the Australian Alumni program. He is founder of the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) and has a long and remarkable history of Thai community development work, including sustainable programs to prevent HIV/AIDS and fight rural poverty.

Time: Registration at 17.30, talk commences at 18.00
Price: Pre-Booked, Baht 200. Walk-ins- Baht 300.

Khun Mechai Viravaidya
Mechai Viravaidya founded the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) in 1974 to address the unsustainable population growth rate in Thailand of over three per cent annually at the time. A variety of humorous, innovative, and unorthodox methods were utilised in conjunction with mobilising and educating a network of rural school teachers and village community members to make contraceptives available throughout Thailand. This resulted in the more sustainable population growth rate of 0.5 per cent by 2003. When HIV/AIDS first appeared in Thailand in the mid-1980s, similar methods were used to launch a major prevention program, which resulted in a 90 per cent decline in new infections according to UNAIDS and an estimated 7.7 million lives saved according to the World Bank, within 12 years. In between running PDA’s activities, he was appointed to such key positions as Thailand’s Cabinet spokesman, the Minister of the Office of the Prime Minister, and Chairman of several of Thailand’s largest government-owned enterprises. He was also elected to the Senate between 1987-1991, 1996-2000, and 2000-2006.

Recognising that civil society organisations cannot survive and expand solely on the generosity of others, Mechai Viravaidya established Thailand’s first social enterprise to help fund the operating costs of PDA in 1975. Since then, this company has spawned 18 other social enterprises which have contributed significantly to the financial needs of the association. Perhaps the best known is the Cabbages and Condoms Restaurants and Resorts.