Taiwan Today

The second stage of the APEC Digital Opportunity Center project initiated by Taiwan targets helping the disadvantaged in member economies through the combined resources of enterprises, NGOs and the government.

Since the beginning of June this year, people in Hualien County, eastern Taiwan may have caught glimpses of heavily laden minivans traveling in remote corners of the area. The minivans are part of a special project that transports computers and teachers to help the county’s economically disadvantaged communities enter the digital age. The three mobile e-learning centers were made possible through the collective effort of the public sector, private sector and a non-governmental organization (NGO). More specifically, the project is part of a larger program guided by the Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), while major supporters include computer giant Acer Inc., which provides much of the equipment and the operational expenses, and Hanguang Education Foundation, the group that executes the Hualien project.

Although operating in Hualien County, one of the places lagging behind the rest of the island in terms of digital development, the mobile e-learning centers are actually part of the APEC Digital Opportunity Center (ADOC) 2.0 initiative. The goal of the project is to narrow the digital divide not only in remote rural areas of Taiwan, but also in APEC member economies across the region. Two of the project’s mobile e-learning centers, for example, have been operating in the Manila metropolitan area in the Philippines since 2009, but ADOC 2.0’s scope will be soon extended to reach people living far from such city centers, according to George Huang, co-founder of Acer and currently director-general of the ADOC 2.0 Non-Government Office. “People in some of those places have to walk three hours to e-learning centers now, so in the future we want to get to them through mobile ones and make e-leaning opportunities more accessible,” he says.

The original ADOC initiative was introduced by Taiwan at the 2003 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Bangkok with the goal of creating digital opportunities for partner economies by providing them with free equipment and training. “ADOC is in line with the goals of Ecotech, which is one of the three pillars that serve to boost the region’s development,” says Huang Chih-peng, director-general of the BOFT, which executes and supervises the ADOC project. Ecotech, or economic and technical cooperation, involves efforts to narrow developmental gaps in the region, which in turn can strengthen trade, boost investment and facilitate business opportunities, the BOFT chief says.

Taiwan is well equipped to take on the task of narrowing the region’s digital divide because it has developed a world-famous information technology (IT) industrial sector as well as a solid IT infrastructure. On the other hand, the director-general says, by operating a project that benefits much of the region, Taiwan expects to increase its visibility on the world stage, consolidate friendships with other APEC countries and boost business opportunities for participating Taiwanese enterprises.

According to the BOFT, the project’s first stage between August 2004 and the end of 2008 resulted in the establishment of 43 digital centers offering a combined total of more than 600 computers in Chile, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The BOFT figures also show that through 2008, users had made more than 70,000 visits to these training centers.

Digital Opportunities

Acer co-founder Stan Shih proposed the ADOC 2.0 initiative while serving as Taiwan’s representative at the 2007 APEC Leaders’ Meeting in Sydney, Australia and the project was formally launched in early 2009. Targeting women, children, small-enterprise owners and economically and socially disadvantaged people, ADOC 2.0 reflects APEC’s growing seriousness about developing the regional economy through the creation of digital opportunities. While APEC has established other broad initiatives aimed at reaching this goal, for example by striving to achieve universal broadband access across the region by 2015, Taiwan’s effort is aimed squarely at the people using the equipment. In short, ADOC seeks to use e-learning as a means to improve digital literacy and thereby raise living standards.

Whereas the original ADOC project was mostly a government effort, ADOC 2.0 is characterized by its “PPP” model, or public-private partnership. Echoing the Web 2.0 concept’s traits of collaboration and sharing, the revamped program is actually a platform that enables the public sector, private sector and NGOs to work together to make the best use of available resources.

At present, ADOC 2.0 boasts the support of 18 NGOs and businesses. NGOs include Hanguang Education Foundation and the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, an influential charity group known for its relief work at home and abroad. Since February 2009, Tzu Chi has been cultivating “seed teachers” specializing in computer science to teach disadvantaged people around Taiwan. As of the end of August this year, nearly 300 seed teachers had been trained, most of whom are Tzu Chi volunteers. The charity may consider sending these teachers to work in ADOC centers in other APEC member economies in the future.

Major enterprise backers from Taiwan include Acer and AsusTek Computer Inc., another world-class IT player, while the Taipei Computer Association also supports the project by collecting and donating used computers. “The ADOC 2.0 Non-Government Office is housed at the Taipei Computer Association headquarters, which is another example of the private resources devoted to the ADOC project,” says George Huang of the ADOC 2.0 Non-Government Office.

It is not easy to break down precisely the contributions the private sector and NGOs have made to ADOC 2.0 so far, since they provide support to the project through various means ranging from hardware to personnel. What is certain is that ADOC 2.0 is reducing the original project’s drain on government resources. The BOFT’s Huang Chih-peng notes that while the government—namely the MOEA, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Council for Economic Planning and Development—contributed about NT$342 million (US$10.7 million) to the original ADOC effort, its financial responsibility under ADOC 2.0 has been reduced to NT$120 million (US$3.75 million) for the three years from 2009 through 2011. “The participation of the private sector has lessened the financial burden on the government to a great extent,” he says.

ADOC 2.0 is also exerting a greater influence outside Taiwan through a project devoted to enabling visually impaired people to work. Chunghwa Telecom, the largest telecommunications company in Taiwan, began working with Tamkang University in Taipei County in February 2009 to develop a computerized system that enables the visually impaired to perform customer service over the telephone. In October 2009, Chunghwa extended this effort overseas by establishing a digital center in Quezon City, one of the cities in the metropolitan Manila area in the Philippines. The effort trains visually impaired workers to operate the system and then employs them as customer service representatives at the center. Acer played an important supporting role in the Quezon City project by donating 11 desktop computers and a server. Plans also call for a second center of this type to open in Beijing next month.

Meanwhile, Mexico joined ADOC 2.0 in the summer of 2009 by setting up two e-Learning Digital Centers in the state of Sonora, thereby becoming the eighth APEC member economy to have participated in the original ADOC and ADOC 2.0 projects. This year saw the inclusion of Russia and Malaysia, with Taiwan helping set up two e-Learning Digital Centers in each country. The Russian and Malaysian centers are expected to begin operating by the end of the year, bringing the total number of original ADOC and ADOC 2.0 e-learning centers operating worldwide to 60.

Expanding Participation

The project also continues to expand in partner economies that participated in the original ADOC project. This year, for example, the ADOC 2.0 e-Training Program has been offered in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. In each country, 30 trainees have taken courses in subjects ranging from e-commerce and Mandarin language instruction to computer maintenance. At the same time, older computers and peripherals are being revamped in existing e-learning centers across the region to provide students with hands-on experience with modern hardware. Teaching materials are also being redesigned to serve the needs of children, women and minority groups.

Of all APEC partner economies taking part in the ADOC 2.0 project, the Philippines has become one of the most deeply involved, with four e-learning centers and two mobile ones established in 2009. From January to July this year, there were around 34,500 visits in total to ADOC training centers in eight participating APEC partner economies, with 30 percent of those visits made in the Philippines, while Peru accounted for another 30 percent.

George Huang of the ADOC 2.0 Non-Government Office notes that NGOs in the Philippines such as Child Hope Asia and the Ai-Fu Foundation have been crucial to the project’s expansion in the country. “For ADOC to keep expanding in the region, we need more local non-governmental or nonprofit organizations to cooperate with us, because they understand the needs of local people, just like Hanguang Education Foundation understands the needs of people in Hualien here in Taiwan,” he says.

While ADOC participation rates are high in the Philippines and Peru, which together account for nearly two-thirds of all visits, some other APEC member economies with ADOC centers have been slower to take part in the project. “The government in the Philippines is quite enthusiastic about the project, but not all governments participate as actively, even though we encourage them to do so,” the BOFT’s Huang Chih-peng says of why ADOC participation rates vary across the region.

That being said, the BOFT chief notes that other APEC member economies frequently cite ADOC as Taiwan’s most important contribution to the organization. With ADOC 2.0 gathering momentum, the project appears likely to continue having a positive impact on the lives of the region’s digitally disadvantaged. “Taiwan has long sent agricultural technical missions abroad to help its allies and has been quite successful in improving their agriculture sectors,” George Huang says. “Now we should aid others with resources from our information technology industry.” While the results of the original ADOC project have been hailed by APEC member economies, the combined resources of enterprises, NGOs and the government in funding and operating ADOC 2.0 should give a further boost to digital literacy and living standards.

Entrepreneurs with a Mission

Great entrepreneurs are more than just smart people who seek business opportunities and financial gains for their own benefit. They also help further social and economic development by sharing their experiences and working toward the public good. Such are the members of the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), a channel through which selected entrepreneurs in the region have been offering advice to APEC leaders since ABAC held its first meeting in the Philippines in 1996.

At the 1994 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, the organization announced the Bogor Goals, which call for developed APEC member economies to open up their trade and investment environments by this year and for the organization’s developing economies to do so by 2020. In 1995, the leaders met in Japan and announced the Osaka Action Agenda, which established guiding principles for member economies to follow in order to achieve the Bogor Goals. The organization was cognizant, however, that advice from the business sector would be an important part of meeting those goals. “APEC was increasingly aware that the inclusion of the private sector, especially private enterprises, was crucial to its effective development,” says Grace Chung, an associate research fellow specializing in ABAC at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.

ABAC was created at the 1995 Leaders’ Meeting and began operating the following year. Convening four times each year and attended by three representatives from each of the 21 member economies, ABAC reports the results of its meetings to APEC economic leaders, as well as holds face-to-face discussions with the leaders around the time of the Leaders’ Meeting, which will take place in Yokohama, Japan this month. ABAC has met in Taipei three times, with the most recent gathering taking place in May this year.

Taiwan’s ABAC delegation currently consists of leader Tsai Hong-tu, chairman of Cathay Financial Holdings Co., a large finance and insurance company; Matthew Miau, chairman of the MiTAC-SYNNEX Group, a global information technology company; and Cher Wang, co-founder and chairwoman of HTC Corp., a maker of popular smartphones sold around the world. “All three of them have achieved a great amount and the three business sectors they represent are also receiving a lot of attention at APEC,” Chung observes. “They’re also great ABAC delegates because they’re passionate about the work, good-natured and fluent in English, which helps them interact effectively with their counterparts from the rest of the region. Their efforts help Taiwan connect with the world.”

Tsai, for example, is a member of the Finance and Economics Working Group, one of the five working groups under ABAC this year. At the request of Japan, the Cathay chairman shared Taiwan’s experience in developing its small and medium-sized businesses (SME) with APEC members at this year’s third ABAC meeting in Bangkok, which took place in August. One major point he touched on in the report was the financing services platform through which Taiwan assists its SMEs. Another example of the support offered by Taiwan for the benefit of SMEs in other APEC economies is the SME Crisis Management Center established in Taipei in May this year. The center’s mission is to detect early signs of a global financial crisis and provide related warnings to SMEs in the region.

Matthew Miau’s work with ABAC comes mainly in the form of his role in the Facilitation Working Group, where the entrepreneur is currently one of the four co-chairs. Dedicated to regional economic integration and sustainable growth, this year the Facilitation Working Group is focusing on specific issues such as intellectual property rights protection, as well as on eliminating business barriers within each member economy. Miau’s group is also addressing transnational issues such as the movement of labor from one economy to another, as well as the integration of supply chains spread over different economies.

The major contribution of Cher Wang, Taiwan’s first female ABAC delegate, is her work in the founding and advancement of the Innovative Growth initiative. Wang proposed the project at ABAC’s initial meeting this year in February in Melbourne, Australia. “Knowledge provides ways of producing and delivering goods and services to more people more efficiently,” she said at the beginning of a forum on the issue during the second ABAC meeting in Taipei in May this year. “That means higher gross domestic product at lower costs and energy consumption, which is better for the environment.”

The development of clean energy sources will play an important role in the type of growth Wang envisions. Taiwan’s commitment to green energy can be seen in its recently established goal of boosting the amount of electricity generated from renewable resources from the current 8 percent to 15 percent by 2025. President Ma Ying-jeou has also called for the island to limit carbon emissions to the 2005 level by 2020. In the meantime, the Bureau of Energy plans to spend at least NT$20 billion (US$625 million) over the next five years on green energy research. Taiwan plans to share its renewable energy policy experience, research results and business opportunities at the APEC Green Showcase, which is scheduled to run concurrently with this month’s Leaders’ Meeting. The Green Showcase will be held in Tokyo, about 30 kilometers from the Leaders’ Meeting in Yokohama.

Like the two other successful entrepreneurs serving as Taiwan’s ABAC delegates, Wang is focused on an economic picture that extends beyond the fortunes of her own company. All three should be credited with contributing to the development of the Asia Pacific region, as well as with boosting Taiwan’s presence on the world stage by sharing their locally earned business experience.

—Oscar Chung

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw