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ASEAN Foundation wants to promote ASEAN identity: Official
To mark the commemoration of ASEAN Day, which falls on August 8, The Jakarta Post's Tony Hotland interviewed the ASEAN Foundation's new executive director, Filemon A
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Question: Could you briefly shed some light on the ASEAN Foundation's activities?
Answer: The ASEAN Foundation was established in 1997 through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) among ASEAN member countries, and has two objectives.
The first one is to promote human resource development, to address socio-economic disparities and also poverty alleviation.
The second mandate is to promote ASEAN awareness and an ASEAN identity, and the interaction among ASEAN stakeholders.
The ASEAN Foundation is now fully enshrined in the ASEAN Charter, we're on Article 15. Under that charter, our mandate now is more toward promoting the ASEAN identity, so when the ASEAN Community is established by 2015, people in the region will start thinking they are not only Indonesian but also ASEAN, not only Filipino but also ASEAN, and so on.
Because of that, our activities are directed toward ends to be able to attain that. For instance, one of our major and most recent activities was the ASEAN Quest computer game. It was launched last month in Manila during the ASEAN Science and Technology Week.
To young people, you can't explain ASEAN with a PowerPoint presentation, you know? But they would be very interested in playing a game where they can learn a lot of things about ASEAN -- the flags, the national anthems, the languages, the historical sites, ASEAN documents.
Our main objective is to promote the ASEAN identity, particularly among the young because they're going to be the leaders. They should know about ASEAN.
The other activity we're doing is trying to link up more with the business sector. We are trying to partner with various corporate foundations, to work with them and tap their financial resources because these corporations have a lot of resources in providing assistance to the poor or scholarships. We have scholarships, we have some 30 scholars right now. I'm in discussions with these foundations to support scholarships. We might be able to bring students from all over ASEAN to each member state to study.
Where do you get your financing?
We are funded by the governments. The 10 governments set up an endowment fund, and then they contributed to it. It's deposited in the bank, it earns interest and we use the interest for our operations. For our projects, we have grants. From Japan, for instance, which is very generous. They gave us US$20 million some years ago and we used it to fund projects. South Korea also gave us some, as did China, France, Canada. We are also working with Microsoft Indonesia and HP Indonesia.
What are your priority projects?
Science and technology projects, scholarships, poverty alleviation. Many of the projects in the past were on human resource development and capacity building. We had workshops, training for trainers. There haven't been too many projects on building awareness and identity, so that's my goal now during my term.
Critics have pointed out that ASEAN is the talk of the elites and the bureaucrats, not the people on the streets. How do you expect to create an ASEAN identity?
We are now producing materials to be distributed to the people of ASEAN so they can receive more information. One of the things we're thinking now, let's say we manage to convince 10 or 20 corporate foundations to work with us on scholarships. Maybe we can provide the costs of transportation, and say each of them can support five scholars from each country. So that's 50. Twenty foundations will cover 1,000 scholars. With that kind of movement of young students within ASEAN, over the years people will start learning about their neighboring countries and their cultures. It is a long-term project.
It is true that perhaps not many people outside government circles are familiar with ASEAN. It is a task that requires much from ASEAN governments because they have a presence in the provinces, in the kampongs, to promote ASEAN ideas. For us, because we are very limited, all we can do is work with them to provide funding for some of their activities and, at the same time, work with corporations.
This will take time. Even in the next 10 years it may not have happened, because ASEAN is a very large region, very diverse, with many problems to solve. ASEAN governments will have to implement activities that promote identity, and the foundation helps by providing financial resources and materials.
Speaking of presence, how familiar are institutions and development agencies with the ASEAN Foundation?
Unfortunately what I found out when I came into office in January this year was that almost nobody in the private sector knew about us, although we've been in existence since 1997. Even within the government sector, many have no idea about the foundation.
I do not want to criticize my predecessors, but unfortunately I think they did not try to reach out to the private sector in the past. The way we've been operating is we wait for proposals to be submitted to us, but there hasn't been a proactive mechanism to reach out.
There are two challenges we face in the 11 years we've been here. The first is financial. We are always faced with that, particularly now that interest earnings are very low because our endowment fund is in time deposit and is not allowed to be invested in bonds or stocks. With no operating funds, it's difficult to support or expand your manpower, to support travel and promotional activities.
The second is the structure of the foundation. We've been trying to make it more to be able to attain the objectives rather than actual technical work. Here we don't want people to be a specialist in biotechnology or environmental ecology. We should outsource that, work with other groups. The kind of expertise we have here will be more about communication, community development. So we're slowly addressing this problem. But still our main challenge in the future is to have enough financial and manpower resources to be able to implement activities according to the mandates.
What kind of role do ASEAN governments play in your operations?
They are the board of trustees, represented by ambassadors of ASEAN countries to Indonesia. The chairmanship rotates every year. The director-general of the office of ASEAN affairs in each country is a member of our council of advisors. We provide them with regular reports on our activities.
All the projects we support are subject to approval by the board of trustees. Project proposals are submitted to them, they study them, and then we receive their comments. Once a proposal is approved, we can start funding the project. So they are very involved in our work, but the day-to-day operations are decided by the executive director.
