Management of the Village Fund in Khammuang District Kalasin Province

Abstract

This study aimeห 1) examine the participant’s attitude on the village fund management in Khammuang District, Kalasain province; and 2) seek the useful suggestions on the village fund management. The data is collected using questionnaire provided to 400 villagers, as the sample group, who are the fund members in the target area. Desdriptive statistics namely frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation were used to analysis the data” . The finding was affirmed that the member’s overall attitude is rated with high score. In terms of the direction on the fund management, the participants suggested that there should be the staffs specially assigns to be a responsible person and consultant for the fund management working under a specific management scheme. Additionally, the cooperation amidst the fund committees should be constantly encouraged to work mutually in monitoring and solving possible problems e.g. follow-up on the member with outstanding debt – if a notice has been given to and ignored by an indebted member, a chief district officer will join to solve the problem. For planning, the village fund policy is basically determined by the government with an aim to support the villagers, especially the poor. The participants believe that the fund can push forward the local economic system. Meanwhile, the responsible staffs are the fund committees that have been voted amongst the villagers. These committees are skillful and intended to do their jobs. In particular, the financial staffs are knowledgeable in economics and used to deal with the fund so they can definitely manage it effectively. In term of the organizational management, the participants believe that the fund committees know how to effectively work on the member recruitment, consideration on providing the loan, payback, accounting and fund checking, and the promotion. Still, the district officers keep providing several training programs to improve the committee’s working skill especially in financial management and accounting. For the services, the participants commonly spend the fund in the wrong way and cannot succeed their purposes. Thus, the employment creation has not been clearly a success, which could be resulted from that fact that most of the villagers are low educated. To solve this, the district officers should provide them with extra courses to develop their professional skill. For controlling procedure, the member recruitment has been done following the village fund regulation. That is, an applicant should have been living in the villager for 1 year and for those who quitted, they should have been left for 2 years before they can apply again. This regulation will be read clearly item by item to the members and before the fund will be provided, the committees will equally consider the member’s purpose on using the money. This consideration has been fairly done since the committees know all members and their backgrounds. Hence, they live like relatives and support one another to create their employment. In addition, period of payback will be scheduled by the fund committees depending on the member’s purposes – in case of product seller, the payback should be done monthly since they can daily earn money.