SideKick

As we continue our waste management scoping around Bangkok, we came across something really special in the Romklao area of Ladkrabang.

It’s called “Ban YaYai” — or Grandma’s House.

The issue is that many parents are leaving young children with grandmothers during the day. Some toddlers, especially around 0–2 years old, end up spending hours on mobile phones because the grandmothers are also busy with housework and daily responsibilities.

Over time, this has affected some children’s speech and social development. Some children arrive at kindergarten still unable to speak or interact properly.

So Uncle Preecha, the community leader, got some funding and started Ban YaYai.

Instead of each grandmother staying at home alone with their grandchild, the grandmothers come together and bring their หลาน ๆ to this shared space. There are books, toys, other toddlers to play with, and the grandmothers can help each other look after the children.

A teacher also comes once a week to train and support the grandmothers.

And after just a few months, they are seeing a huge difference. Children who were not speaking are starting to speak. They are playing more, interacting more, and slowly catching up.

Honestly, it was amazing to see.

Uncle Preecha is awesome. We came here looking at waste management, but found so many other examples of community-led ideas and care.

Sometimes the best local innovations are already happening quietly in communities — we just need to notice them.

“What’s your great dream?” We asked Auntie Na, a 64-year-old community leader from one of the small canal communities in Prawet District, Bangkok. She said: “For the canal to be clean forever.”

And for young people to join her and the other aunties and uncles, so the work can continue.

It sounds like a small ask, but for her it is the biggest and most important thing in her life. She has lived here since the canals were still the roads of Bangkok, before the roads grew around the community.

We’re now doing a scoping exercise on how communities around our capital are working on waste management — many of them in very different ways.

The other photos are from youth groups in Hua Takhe Market, working on a prototype card game.

The game teaches people about the value of different types of waste. Players compete by picking or buying cards based on the descriptions being read out. Each waste card has a different value, so players collect the cards and turn them into “income” — and the person with the highest value wins.
Quite fun — our team had a go at it too!

Really happy to be working with ECCA Family Foundation on this.

It was a great opportunity to speak at the Better Air Quality (BAQ) Conference, one of the region’s most important gatherings bringing together city leaders, researchers, and practitioners working to improve air quality across Asia.

As part of the session “People-Centered Solutions: Making Inclusive Urban Planning Work for Clean Air and Climate Action,” we shared insights from our work in Bangkok on user-led behavior change research for air quality communication, conducted with Breathe Cities and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA).

A key focus of the discussion was how cities can move beyond simply sharing information about pollution and instead build trust, relevance, and public engagement.

Some early insights from the research include:

- People want to see clear evidence that policies and actions are making a difference
- Communication needs to be useful in daily life, not just informational
- Most importantly, one message does not reach everyone

Different groups experience air pollution differently and respond in different ways. Effective communication therefore requires audience segmentation and messages that resonate with different levels of concern, exposure, and daily realities.

What was especially encouraging was the level of interest in the approach. After the session, colleagues from several cities stayed on to discuss how behavior-informed communication and user-led research could be applied in their own contexts.

Clean air solutions are not only technical or policy challenges — they also depend on how well cities engage people and support everyday behavior change.

It was inspiring to see so many practitioners across the region exploring how people-centered approaches can strengthen the impact of clean air and climate action