Mentor and friend: Korea's KOICA and its e-development role

I didn’t want to harp back to 2010 for this first blog entry of the new decade, but then I remembered a dinner I had after the FutureGov Forum in Hanoi last month.
I was invited out by a friend, Chang-hak Choi, President of Korea’s Culture and Service Information Agency to meet some of his ‘students’—a young and enthusiastic collection of civil servants from various strands of the Vietnamese Government.
Dr Choi does a lot of work with the Vietnamese government on behalf of the Korean International Co-operation Agency (KOICA), as part of the organisation’s role in promoting ICT expertise and best practice to support the Millenium Development Goals.
His expertise is e-government—he talks about the structural barriers to rolling out a national e-government programme, and how the integral change message must come from the top down, among other things, as it did in Korea (it is not widely known that Korea leapt from 15th to 1st on the UN’s ICT rankings in just eight years).
Long after dinner had finished and by pure coincidence I bumped into the Head of Public Procurement for the Ministry of Finance from Mongolia.
He was in Hanoi to attend a workshop held by the World Bank and to talk about the rollout of a national e-procurement scheme.
In terms of change management, it is a massive job: It will involve more public disclosure of government procurement—not exactly in everyone’s best interest— through a one-stop bid system.
By 2013, he told me, all procurement transactions in Mongolia will be done online.
Only after we discussed project partnerships did I realise that the entire e-procurement model was based on Korea’s same system, supported by KOICA with Korean expertise and technology.
KOICA’s reach is astonishing. In 2008, it delivered 39.7 per cent of its total aid budget or US$109.3 million to support 29 countries in the Asian region (21 countries in Asia and 8 countries in Oceania).
Among its Asian partner countries, Cambodia received the largest volume of aid—US$13.1 million, followed by Mongolia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
The top five partners in the region received 19.5 per cent of KOICA’s total project budget or 49.2 per cent of budget allocation focused on Asia.
It is often commented that ASEAN—the regional body that represents the batch of mainly developing South East Asian nations—has been slow to address the benefits of ICT in its grouping.
It has an ICT masterplan in the making, which was developed under the guidance of a taskforce, but it is not vocal in its work and there is no obvious trace of progress.
It is that void that organisations like KOICA are filling, with years of expertise, cutting edge technology and change management experience.
Dinner with Dr Choi and his students was delicious by the way: traditional Vietnamese food served on the banks of one of the many lakes dotted around the city.
The following day he was off to neighbouring Cambodia, once again to talk about the role of e-government in development.