The Mae Fah Luang Foundation Under Royal Patronage

Sustainable Alternative Livelihood Development (SALD) is a people-centric development approach with an end vision of providing people with sustainable and licit livelihoods. The model tackles poverty and lack of opportunity, which are the roots causes of problems like illicit narcotic crop cultivation, human trafficking, weak social structure, environmental degradation, and the prevalence of infectious diseases. Mae Fah Luang Foundation developed this model through the work in Doi Tung and beyond, refining traditional Alternative Development and crop substitution methods to tackle poverty through three interventions; solving the problem of health, livelihood and education. The main objective of SALD is to transform poor and vulnerable communities from socio-economic dependency on subsistent living, to full socio-economic sufficiency in a participatory manner. Through several decades of development work, the MFLF has developed a set of best practices based on the evolution of the SALD model in Doi Tung, Doi Tung II (Union of Myanmar), Doi Tung III (Islamic Republic of Afghanistan), and Doi Tung IV (Republic of Indonesia)