Mission innumerable

The Institute’s own mission statement goes further. KIAsia’s role, it says, is “to serve as a Thai-US institute of excellence that brings together the resources for the private sector, government agencies and academia in partnerships for sustainable economic and social development in Asia.”

“We started out as a project of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),” Wedel explains. “They wanted a transition vehicle for USAID to end its bilateral programme in Thailand. The economy was booming and USAID decided that Thailand was too successful economically and even socially to warrant further aid when there were a lot of worse off countries around the world.

After two years, the partners succeeded in setting up the Kenan Institute Asia. Funding came in the form of an endowment with roughly equal donations from the Thai government, the US government through USAID and the Kenan Charitable Trust.

KIAsia’s first and only chairman is Anand Panyarachun. Wedel says the former prime minister was attracted by the concept behind the institute – “the idea of private-sector based development assistance and a partnering relationship rather than a donor-recipient relationship.”

A big reason KIAsia’s activities are so diverse is that it has been set up to respond to development needs that are in a constant state of flux. Changes can be abrupt indeed.

“With USAID programme in Thailand closed, we were off on our own in 1996,” Wedel recalls. “We had great visions of raising money from the fast-growing Thai corporate sector. Then 1997 happened.”

It turned out that KIAsia was uniquely placed to play an important role in the economic recovery. “Fortunately, for us, this [financial crisis] returned attention to continuing Thai development needs, particularly in the areas of better business practices, business standards, training and education,” Wedel points out.

With local unemployment soaring, KIAsia quickly helped put together about 30 different programmes funded by a group of major American corporations operating in Thailand. These programmes focused largely on re-educating people who were out of work so they could take new jobs.

“There were about 10,000 people laid off from the finance sector when the government closed half the finance companies in the country and merged or suspended some of the banks, so these people were out in the street and there were stories in the media about them selling sandwiches and so on,” Wedel recalls.

One of the KIAsia training initiatives that was most relevant to this group was its internal auditor programme. Internal auditors were now mandated by the Stock Exchange of Thailand for its listed companies because the financial crisis had revealed major good governance deficiencies.

“There were very few people in the country who were trained in this field, Wedel explains. “There was no university programme in internal auditing. There were external training programmes but that is very different. So we put together a programme with the stock exchange, the internal audit association and the security analysts association.”

As the Asian financial crisis worsened, US government funds became available through a programme called Accelerating Economic Recovery in Asia (AERA). “In most countries, there was an existing USAID programme so they just channelled this funding through those missions, but in Thailand there was no mission, so they decided to channel almost all of it through Kenan,” Wedel explains.

The result was a whole new set of programmes. “One was retraining or training finance people within the banks, so that they would understand and would be able to perform to Bank of Thailand rules. We had another programme that provided management advice on recovery and new financing for small businesses and we had a programme that looked directly at business standards – everything from accounting standards, to setting up markets to bond trading.”

Even the court system was included, Wedel adds. “A partnership we set up with the American Bankruptcy Institute helped the Central Bankruptcy Court develop some of its processes.”

At the time, the financial crisis was attributed largely to overexuberance, a bubble mentality that had little concern for mundane matters like risk and economic viability. But as the KIAsia staff became more involved with the recovery effort, it became clear to them that the problems went deeper.

“We recognised that one of the issues behind the financial crisis was that the education system had not kept pace with the development of the economy, particularly in science, math and English, but more broadly in terms of skills that could not be easily tested by multiple choice questions.

“That meant that these skills really weren’t being taught in Thai schools – things like creativity, independent thinking, problem analysis, working in teams, finding information independently, analysing information. All these skills are in high demand in a more sophisticated economy and they just weren’t being taught.”

That is how KIAsia, through the AERA programme, became involved in English language course development and, more recently, in information technology for education, particularly outside the economically advantaged urban centres.

To Wedel, this makes very good sense. “Really, given sufficient bandwidth, someone looking at a computer screen in Mae Hong Son is very much on the same plane as someone in downtown Bangkok or New York, so students in rural areas can conceivably at least be on the same playing field as students anywhere,” he asserts.

KIAsia has also taken a big interest in Thailand’s fledgling community college system, Wedel says.

“The community college system is filling a real niche. There really hadn’t been a place where people could go for life-long learning. All the other institutions were centrally organised with a national curriculum and there was nothing that could respond very quickly to local needs, particularly local employment needs. Do you need computer programmers? Do you need welders? What do you need quickly in a particular area?”

“There was nothing to help people who wanted to go back for further training, short course training, particularly in IT or, in tourist areas where there was a big demand for English. So we thought that people who were developing this system would be interested in all the US models. The US has 50 different community college systems. We helped set up a consortium of about five different community college systems and we took the leaders of the community college system to see those.”

Taken together KIAsia’s programmes in business and education constitute about two-thirds of its functions. True to its USAID origins, it also conducts programmes in traditional development fields like public health and the environment. Ultimately, however, Wedel believes that everything they do is really education.

“Sometimes we think we’re doing environment, we’re doing business or we’re doing public health, but when you get down to it, it’s all education or training. You can’t develop a country without developing people.”

One section of KIAsia with a very clear connection to education is the University Linkages Programme and U-Links Services under the Human Capacity Development Division.

One of the unit’s most important responsibilities involves KIAsia’s assistance to Thailand’s community college system. According to Project Manager Kamolmas Jaiyen the relationship is a natural outgrowth of KIAsia’s interest and expertise in fostering development linkages between the private sector and government.

“The community college itself is a brand-new concept in Thailand,” Ms Kamolmas observes. “Each college has a Board of trustees that invites people in the community – business owners, government officials, community representatives, representatives from the Federation of Thai Industries and the Chamber of Commerce to sit on the board and decide what they really want for education in their province.”

Interestingly, one of the course areas where KIAsia has been called in to assist is in the field of personal financial literacy. “We see that in the provinces, government officials and community members are trapped in a debt cycle and this is an opportunity for the colleges to reach out to them. We helped to develop the curriculum and train the teachers,” Ms Kamolmas explains.

How this was done illustrates very well KIAsia’s painstaking approach. The expertise for the project, explains Ms Kamolmas, comes from both internal and external sources.

“We have formed a committee of experts in the area. First, we have our have financial advisory consultants based at our Business Advisory Centre. Then we have Ms Nawaaporn Ryanskul, a former Secretary-General of the Government Pension Fund. Since this project was funded by GE Capital, we also have experts from GE to sit on the committee. Finally, we brought in an expert from the US to discuss how we should deliver the curriculum.

“In terms of content, every curriculum is the same, covering budgeting, loans, things like that. What we learned from the US experience, however, is that there can be an activity-based curriculum where people actually learn to think about their budgets instead of just having a trainer in front of the room doing the teaching.”

Once the curriculum is developed, little is left to chance, Ms Kamolmas relates. “First, we do a pilot test in a real setting. For example, in this curriculum we want to target government officials, farmers and new entrepreneurs, so we invite five or six of these groups to attend the training. We get feedback from them and make improvements. Then we do train-the-trainer sessions with community college trainers. Our GE volunteers go out with our group of experts and team-teach with the college trainers, so they are more confident in delivering the curriculum.”

For more information, see the Kiasia website (www.kiasia.org). For information specific to education projects, write to education@kiasia.org. You can also contact 02-229-3131 ext. 202 for information on projects of the Institute.