The Phayao Story

Jean-Louis Lamboray of the Constellation describes what has happened in Phayao.
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...and then explains what he learned from his experience in Phayao.
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How learning from what happened in Phayao Province, Thailand led to the idea of AIDS Competence

Phayao is a province of some 500,000 people in the north of Thailand.

During 1997-1998, Jean-Louis Lamboray spent a year working with the AIDS Action Centre in Phayao in order to understand how the remarkable results presented in the diagram below and discussed in the first video had been achieved.

The results of the study are described in the UNAIDS report "HIV and health care reform in Phayao: from crisis to opportunity" (UNAIDS Best Practice Collection, April 2000). The main points are discussed in the second video and summarised below:

1. Effective responses to HIV are people driven, not commodity driven.

2. You need the distribution of condoms and drugs and tests etc. But they do not substitute for what people decide what to do by themselves.

3. The key is the process of ownership of the issue, whereby people take action appropriate to their own context.