We’re on the right track

I was in Seoul, South Korea last week to receive an award for my work with MSMEs. It was the ASEAN Entrepreneurs Award, given by the ASEAN-Korea Center during the 27th World Knowledge Forum, organized in partnership with the Maekyung Media Group. I was with my fellow awardee, Vietnam’s Don Lam, the founder and CEO of investment firm VinaCapital Group.

Following the awarding ceremonies, I joined Mr. Lam and the Asan Institute for Policy Studies’ Lee Jaehyon in a discussion session on ASEAN entrepreneurship, investment and resilient growth. There, I shared my experience supporting MSMEs through my work in Go Negosyo and the ASEAN Business Advisory Council (ASEAN-BAC), where my focus has always been on giving entrepreneurs access to money (or capital), mentorship and markets.

The ASEAN Entrepreneurs Award is a platform where business leaders from South Korea and ASEAN can come together to share their experiences and visions, and explore new opportunities for cooperation. I can see how many areas we can cooperate with South Korea.

South Korea is a master class in how to strategically fund and incentivize a country’s creative and cultural sectors to achieve massive global influence and income. You need only look around to realize how much South Korea has influenced pop culture, food, fashion, even language, to realize that this is not an accident – it is deliberate and very well-executed. This becomes relevant to the Philippines as we are set to become the site for the ASEAN Center for Creative Industries, one of the legacies of the Philippines’ chairship of ASEAN 2026.

So it is a deep honor to have been given the ASEAN Entrepreneurs Award in a country that has experienced such success after overcoming so many obstacles in its history. The award is an affirmation that we are on the right track in what we’re doing, not just in Go Negosyo but in our chairship of the ASEAN-BAC. It says to the world that the Philippines has long abandoned the title “Sick Man of Asia,” a pejorative that I absolutely detest. The Philippines has already come a long way.

It was also last week that we at ASEAN-BAC co-organized the 1st RCEP Business and Investment Summit, together with our longtime ally in helping entrepreneurs, Jay Yuvallos and the folks at East Asia Business Council, and the Management Association of the Philippines.

RCEP, or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, is ASEAN plus five nations. So that would be the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and its free trade partners Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

The RCEP can be quite formidable as it is so far the only trade agreement to have together Japan, China and South Korea – all economic powerhouses. With the proposed addition of Timor-Leste (being our newest member of ASEAN), the RCEP could truly become a model of how a strong regional economic bloc can potentially benefit its members, big and small – a classic demonstration of our Big-Brother model in Go Negosyo and our region-wide program for agriculture and food security, the ASEAN Food Security Alliance.

I  say “potentially” because membership does not guarantee the full enjoyment of benefits, only access to them. It is obvious that not all members of the ASEAN, much less the RCEP, are on equal footing. Some are first-world nations, while others are emerging and some are still lagging. We have countries that have very limited access to capital and have very little in terms of civil and digital infrastructure on one end, while on the other are hyper-digital economies that are already established players in the world economy.

It’s the same in business: there are the survival entrepreneurs barely getting by on a day-to-day basis, and there are giant, billion-peso conglomerates with footprints in multiple sectors.

ASEAN is already a major economic engine. The region itself has grown faster than the global economy over the past four decades, and with the addition of China, Japan and South Korea (also known as ASEAN plus three, or APT), it now represents 28 percent of the world’s population. Its share of global GDP and exports has increased substantially and is expected to remain a major driver of global growth, potentially contributing about 43.4 percent of global growth between now and 2030. And with RCEP, we connect 15 economies representing roughly one-third of global GDP.

Experts, however, say there is still “not enough traffic” because it’s still made up mostly of MSMEs. For MSMEs, women entrepreneurs, startup founders and young people, access is still identified as the common barrier.

In the Philippines, the bulk of our entrepreneurs are at the micro level, and these are sari-sari store owners, mom-and-pop shops, home-based food manufacturers, small farmers and a wide variety of very small businesses. There are so many of them that we will need more resources and programs to help them scale up their businesses.

The private sector and the government have made tremendous progress over the years to recognize and help these MSMEs. The private sector (through Go Negosyo) brings in entrepreneurship mentors from its ranks to give free mentoring to active and aspiring entrepreneurs; the Department of Trade and Industry has structured programs that are quite effective at finding and reaching promising MSMEs around the Philippines.

Helping those at the bottom of the pyramid applies not only between people, but also to helping enterprises and countries. It’s the broader application of the adage “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” With hope, and now at this time of uncertainty, I think it is the best time to work more with our neighbors.