While aid focuses on refugees, Thailand's hill tribes are forgotten

From the town of Khun Yuam in northern Thailand’s Mae Hong Son province, it takes over two hours in a four-wheel-drive vehicle crossing rivers, rice paddies, and rocks to reach the village of Ban Mae Khit. There, among the jungle, over 400 Karen hill tribe members reside and have done so for decades.

Over 20 different Indigenous communities — including the Karen — constitute Thailand's hill tribe population of 1 million.

Around 20 villagers are building a concrete dam across the Mae Khit Noi river. The village is dependent on rice and vegetables for sustenance as well as livelihoods, yet access to water is an issue.

Chayut, a farmer, who only wanted to go by his first name, said that if the rice doesn’t get enough water, there’s less to eat. “It’s not good for my family or the animals,” he said.

Farmers usually construct bamboo dams, but Chayut said that these need replacing two or three times a year. A concrete dam with piped irrigation — funded by the Karen Hilltribes Trust, a British charity also known as KHT — should last 25 years, collecting and eking out water to the fields. “Life will be easier,” Chayut said.

Water and food insecurity are just two of the challenges that hill tribe communities like those in Ban Mae Khit face. The remote and mountainous location impedes access to health care, education, and livelihoods, said Matt Jenkins, interim director of KHT.

In a 2020 survey, 34% of Karen respondents in northern Thailand said they rely on bottled water for drinking. Additionally, only 41% of students in Mae Hong Son province complete upper secondary school and 27% of children experience stunting.

Despite such challenges, minimal investment is coming in to change this, said Jenkins.

Experts whom Devex spoke to blamed an implementer and donor focus on lower-income countries and humanitarian needs, as well as a lack of data on the development gaps in Indigenous populations.

“Most international funding is blinded by nationwide indicators” such as human development index levels and the United Nations’ list of so-called least developed countries, Jenkins said.

Before COVID-19, Thailand’s economic growth had been steadily increasing while poverty levels decreased to 6.2% in 2019. In 2011, Thailand was declared an upper-middle-income country.

This development isn’t seeping through to Karen hill tribe communities in the way of social welfare or development programs, Jenkins said. Of the 23 villages that KHT has most recently worked in, he said only one had received support from an NGO in the past. All 23 had been part of a royal or government aid project, but the average time between those and KHT engagement was 15 years. Before KHT, the last time that Chayut’s village had received support was in 2005.

“There are no major [international] players covering the area in any major way,” Jenkins said, adding that they’re not interested because Thailand is an upper-middle-income country. “This means a lot of funders… won’t look at it despite the fact that the beneficiaries would fall under the category of people they want to work with.” Dozens of hill tribes in Thailand, as well as communities around the world, haven’t been raised up within countries as they’ve developed, he added.

World Vision Foundation of Thailand and UNESCO are larger organizations operating in the area, alongside royal aid projects, missionaries, and localized initiatives such as Integrated Tribal Development Foundation and the Association for Akha Education and Culture in Thailand.

Chiang Rai, a city close to the borders of Laos and Myanmar, has hill tribe NGOs and Christian foundations and orphanages, said Nikki Dand, volunteer coordinator at the Chiang Rai office of The Mirror Foundation — an NGO that works to empower women within hill tribes through craft and business skills. “But it’s hard to say whether there’s enough or not,” Dand said.

Though many Indigenous communities need aid and development, they are often overlooked, said Signe Leth, senior adviser for women and land rights in Asia for the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “Sometimes because they lack citizenship … sometimes because they are not recognized as Indigenous, and sometimes because they are seen more as a nuisance than as peoples,” Leth said.

Barriers to supporting hill tribes

According to Leth, governments redirecting funds to assist refugees can also impact Indigenous communities. “This is a very worrying tendency,” she said.

Over 97,000 refugees — the majority of whom belong to ethnic minority groups and have fled persecution in Myanmar — live across nine camps in Thailand. Following last year’s military coup in Myanmar and the subsequent conflict, more refugees have arrived in Thailand.

“There are a lot of issues between development and humanitarianism with forgotten causes,” Jenkins said. “There are huge challenges that face the Karen in Myanmar, which are very well documented, and there are huge challenges that face the Karen as refugees, which are very well documented. Those are real challenges, but ultimately no one is looking at the Thai side — with the assumption that it’s Thailand so it must be all right.”

As part of its efforts in Thailand, the UN Refugee Agency is working with the government to obtain nationality or legal status for the nearly 444,000 stateless people in the country.

“Not all but many stateless persons in Thailand are members of ethnic minorities or hill tribe communities,” UNHCR spokesperson Morgane Roussel-Hemery said in an email. This can affect their education, employment, social welfare, housing, and health care, she added.

“In some countries where there are issues of citizenship for many Indigenous persons — such as Thailand and Malaysia — they are being neglected of aid and development funding,” Leth said.

When asked if UNHCR Thailand provides equal support to hill tribe communities and refugees in Thailand, Roussel-Hemery said that “given that stateless persons and refugees in Thailand face very different situations and are subject to markedly different legal frameworks, which in turn impact access to rights and services, UNHCR’s response for these groups naturally varies.”

While Chayut and his fellow villagers in Ban Mae Khit have ID cards, many other Karen communities don’t, Jenkins said. “And if the people aren’t registered, the government won’t have the data that they’re there.”

Improving support for forgotten communities

As a first step to tackling the problem, more data on the needs of such communities is required, Jenkins said. “If the data is not there, the result is people don’t realize there’s a problem and no one comes to help,” he said.

Dand recounted an unsuccessful attempt to find demographic information on the Mae Yao subdistrict, which is located in Chiang Rai and home to hill tribe communities. UNESCO conducted highland surveys in 2005 and 2010, but they haven’t been replicated since.

“It [data collection] needs funding or it needs NGOs who have data to talk to each other and share what they have,” Jenkins said, adding that grant-makers must then change their funding requirements so that needs aren’t overlooked at the community level.

“It’s right people are looking to ensure that their funding goes to the greatest need. The danger is if you use overly simplistic filters to do that you’ll filter out a lot of communities who genuinely need that help,” he said.

Dand suggested that larger organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, also ask smaller NGOs within forgotten communities about the support they might need. Leth stressed that Indigenous populations, including hill tribes, must be included in discussions about the support they need as well.