Thai agencies spent Bt2.5bn on overseas trips equal to 100 million school lunches

Anti-Corruption Organisation (ACT) says state agencies spent at least Bt2.5 billion on overseas study trips over the past 10 years, an amount it says could have paid for more than 100 million school lunches for children.

Mana Nimitmongkol, secretary-general of the Anti-Corruption Organisation of Thailand, raised the issue in a Facebook post titled Stop overseas study trips disguised as tourism. He said a search of the ACT Ai system using the phrase “overseas study trips” found that between 2016 and 2025, state bodies of all kinds had organised at least 928 such projects at a total cost of no less than Bt2.5 billion, or about Bt250 million a year on average.

According to Mana, the figure covers a broad range of public institutions, including Parliament, the courts, constitutionally independent bodies, government agencies, the military, police and local administrative organisations.

He said the scale of the spending was striking when compared with the school lunch budget for kindergarten and primary school pupils under the Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec). Based on an average lunch allocation of Bt22-Bt27 per child per meal, the annual Bt250 million spent on overseas trips could instead have funded around 10 million school meals, enough to support roughly 50,000 students for an entire academic year. Over a decade, that would amount to more than 100 million meals.

“We keep hearing about corruption involving school lunch budgets, or about budgets being insufficient, so it is a major lost opportunity if the state arranges these trips without regard for outcomes,” Mana said.

He added that although ACT Ai is an effective search tool, the true number of projects may be even higher because agencies often use different titles for similar programmes. These include terms such as study visits, off-site training and study tours, capacity-building, participation in international conferences and exchange programmes, making it harder for the system to capture every case.

Mana said one delegation had previously spent as much as Bt20.8 million on a single overseas trip. The most popular destinations were in Europe, including France, Germany, Italy and Austria, followed by Japan and South Korea. The only period when travel stopped was from 2020 to 2022, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He also set out several broader concerns over the way such trips are organised.

First, he said the public’s objection is not simply about officials travelling abroad, but about the questionable content of many of the programmes. He argued that itineraries often focused heavily on studying the geography, economy, society and arts and culture of tourist cities, suggesting that the real purpose of the trips was obvious. He said overseas study programmes could be acceptable if their core content was genuinely useful, with leisure activities limited to personal time.

Second, Mana said criticism of overseas study trips had existed for years, raising the question of how the government could ensure similar controversies do not continue in future and who should be held responsible.

Third, he said learning from international experience was important, but study trips that concealed tourism amounted to corruption because they used public money and public time for personal benefit. He said such behaviour violated ethical standards requiring officials to place the national interest above their own, and warned that the continued organisation of such trips across many agencies reflected an outdated mindset that treated them as a form of welfare or reward.

Fourth, he said there were more cost-effective alternatives. These included inviting foreign experts to Thailand to share knowledge, holding online meetings, building long-term institutional partnerships, or sending only a small number of directly relevant personnel overseas and requiring them to pass on what they had learned in full.

Mana’s note added that the school lunch comparison was calculated using a midpoint of Bt25 per meal. On that basis, Bt250 million could provide 10 million meals, and with students typically attending school for about 200 days a year, the same budget could support around 50,000 children for one academic year.