THE ASEAN Foundation and SAP SE recently announced the continuation of their strategic collaboration into 2018, following a successful collaboration in its first year to bring about social impact in ASEAN.
Under the Memorandum of Understanding between the ASEAN Foundation and SAP, both organizations will jointly roll out initiatives under two strategic pillars next year, namely Education and Entrepreneurship.
The initiatives are aimed at equipping ASEAN youths with the skills they need to tackle society’s problems and thrive in the digital economy; build the capacity of innovative social enterprises that put young people on the path to successful careers and build a skilled workforce for the IT sector with training and workforce development programmes.
The inaugural year of this collaboration yielded positive outcomes under the following pillars:
Education
The ASEAN Data Science Explorers competition attracted 804 participants from 112 institutions across the 10 ASEAN member states. In the lead-up to the competition, students were trained in SAP’s Analytics Cloud software through a series of webinars and in-country seminars, with more than 600 students accessing the platform.
The competition solicited data-driven insights and ideas on the most pressing social issues in the region. Some highlights include the submission by Team “Omotesando” from Indonesia that aims to accelerate financial inclusion as a solution to poverty eradication through branchless banking, and the submission by Team “Tonkar Data” from Laos which proposes the adoption of smart and vertical farming in ASEAN to improve productivity in agriculture.
Volunteerism
The Youth Volunteering Innovation Challenge, under the theme “Impact ASEAN”, supported young volunteers throughout the ASEAN region in their journey to catalyze youth-led innovation for social impact and sustainable development by providing access to mentors and capital they need to start or scale up their projects.
Some 29 young volunteer innovators from ten teams across ASEAN participated in the YVIC 2017 as part of a collaborative effort by the United Nations Volunteers, United Nations Development Programme, the International Labour Organisation, the ASEAN Foundation, the ASEAN Secretariat, SAP and with the close support of the Government of Germany.
Entrepreneurship
Under the collaboration, SAP supported 9 of out the Top 50 ASEAN social enterprises through two programmes namely the SAP Social Sabbatical and NUS Crossing the Chasm Challenge. SAP employees provided mentorship and consulting to help the enterprises run better.
“Through this synergetic collaboration, we have been able to leverage resources from both organizations to inspire ASEAN youths to actively participate in efforts towards driving a sustainable future for ASEAN. With digitization being the pivotal force in today’s ASEAN economies, both the public and the private sector need to work together to impart digital skills to the young. SAP has been a strong supporter in making consistent effort to move the needle in this respect; we hope to continue to collaborate with them to prepare ASEAN’s workforce for the future,” said Elaine Tan, the Executive Director of the ASEAN Foundation.
The MoU was first signed on May 9, 2017 at the ASEAN Foundation headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia. Since then, the ASEAN Foundation and SAP have been executing on all the programmes under the three pillars.