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eAsia is an annual international event with the objective of reinforcing technology and knowledge-centric growth and needs of Asia.  The eAsia Awards have the aim of acknowledging unique and innovative initiatives in the use of Information and Communication Technology for Development.  Nominations for the awards are screened by an eminent jury, which selects award recipients in each category.  The Award for Best Employment Creation Initiative is in the category of Driving Economy. eAsia is sponsored Cisco Systems, GPiT, HP, Huawei, Intel, Polycom, Samsung and UNDP.

When I first joined DDD, the first thought that came into my mind was what I could do to achieve business sustainability and to deepen DDD social impacts.   As part of my assignment as management trainee during my first three months in Phnom Penh, I observed and saw a big room for improvements in the ways we did things, in our business model as well as the culture to support our growth, sustainability and long term success.    I started building a team by training them in the hard and soft skills needed for their day to day job.  I instilled in them the inner strength, the strong passion, the wish to see DDD future success, and their important roles in realizing the vision, the “can do attitude” , the “ non-discrimination attitude”, the “non hierarchical management system” and most of all, the “dedication for the good of all”.

Your leadership at DDD has shifted how we think about our mission.  Beyond creating jobs and building skills, we now aim to develop young leaders.  How did you come to see this opportunity?

While at DDD, I have seen many young, smart people, who are the country’s future, who already have the strong passion to build a better world and the potential to do so and successfully only if they have the skills needed and the opportunities.   These are the main reasons that drove me to come up with the model to build these young leaders in the way DDD can afford and benefit its business needs.

How has your experience as a woman influenced how DDD supports the young women in our program?

I would say my leadership position had a real impact on all the women whom I managed at DDD.  They looked at me as a role model to strive for success.  My full support and guidance gave them the opportunity to try, to shine and to excel.  Through a merit based system, they all have proved that they too have the ability not less than their male counterparts and in many cases, they are performing even better.

You’ve had a unique way of giving staff opportunities to grow into new roles.  Can you tell us about how you promoted people at DDD?

The way I did this was to encourage staff to do their utmost  to perform, to be creative and to take initiatives to improve the way they do things.  In addition to this, I created a leadership development program to develop those who showed leadership potential.  Each management trainee was put in a leading role to apply what they learnt to manage and improve their work.  After a period of between 3-6 months, managers had enough information to decide who was the best fit.

Many of us at bring aspects of our different faith traditions into our work.  How have your Buddhist beliefs and values influenced your work at DDD?

I was born as a Buddhist but I gained a real understanding about Buddhist values from my MBA program in Australia where we learnt about people management,   leadership and social enterprise.    We discussed Buddhist, Confucius and Lao Tse concepts and where they can effectively address our modern ways of doing things.  We studied how to apply those into the workplace in order to bring out the best value in the people whom we are managing in our current machine like world. 

Can you tell us a bit about your new venture into the jewelry business? How do you intend to take what is now a for profit business and make into a social enterprise?

My new venture takes a very similar to approach to DDD; we are producing jewelry for top online stores in the US market and employing the poor and disabled. In terms of training, we are focusing in two main areas;   specific technical training and soft skills.  We are planning to grow to up to 1000 staff in the future and create the best mega online retail store that will bring pride to the nation and our staff.   We are  now in the stage of developing our business plan to build our own brand and expand the market.

DDD has contracted to carry out the digitization of the survey with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Germany’s agency for international cooperation in sustainable development.  GIZ is providing technical assistance to the Royal Government of Cambodia in conducting the identification program.  Each of the nine provincial planning offices involved in this year’s program will send packets of completed household survey questionnaires to DDD.  Operators will convert the data to digital form in both Khmer and English, the first for Cambodia’s government and the second for the international agencies supporting the program, the Federal Republic of Germany, the European Union, AusAID and UNICEF.   DDD will coordinate workflow with each planning office and ensure meticulous quality assurance for the offices and GIZ.

Along with the surveys, planning officials are collecting digital photographs of each household identified as poor so that households can be issued beneficiary ID cards.  DDD will use photography tracking records to rename each photograph using a household code.  The ID cards should make providing social services more efficient.

Cambodia also expects to use its valuable new digital tool to help in meeting its commitment to reduce poverty by 1% each year as part of the UN Millennium Goals.

As for many of the young people who come to DDD, the organization appeared on Vandany’s horizon by chance.  “One day, I met a kind lady in my neighborhood.  She told me about DDD.  She said that DDD helped disadvantaged people to have access to a better life by giving them scholarships, healthcare, training and employment opportunity,” remembers Vandany.  “I was very excited . . .I wanted to gain more knowledge and better my life.”  She hesitated at first, discouraged by her lack of skills and the disrespect she had known, but Vandany pressed on.  She passed DDD’s rigorous testing and entered training in DDD’s Vientiane, Laos, office in 2005.  She had to begin by learning how to turn a computer on and off, but within three months she had become an operator.  Vandany has not stopped bettering her life ever since.  She has now risen to become a Quality Management Assistant in DDD’s Vientiane office, where she monitors the quality of her team’s work.  “I am proud to work for DDD,” she says.  “I want to do my very best to help DDD transfer the knowledge I have to the next generation in the same way DDD has helped me.”

Globalization has allowed 1,200 people to become billionaires, but workers in the “informal economy” in developing countries ― more than 60 percent of all workers ― have not experienced improvements in living standards as a result of global trade. People want to participate in the global economy; they just can’t gain access.

One new approach for building on-ramps has been coined “impact sourcing.” The idea is to make it attractive for companies to outsource business processes to people in the developing world who come from impoverished or remote communities, who may have only a high school education, and who would otherwise have minimal opportunities to improve their lives.”

See the rest of the story, including more about DDD here.

They give the example of one of DDD’s clients, Litebooks, which had a well designed website, but few clients finding them online. Joe Karuri, who heads the company then discovered Google’s AdWords and with the help of Digital Divide Data, has grown his business.

“I was surprised how well AdWords seemed to drive interested customers to my website,” says Mr Karuri. “Traffic from AdWords is the now the single largest source of registrations on my website.”

The article concludes, “Digital Divide Data, the business process outsourcing firm based in Ngara area, Nairobi, has been certified by Google and now retains a team of 55 digital management operators who optimise online marketing strategies for local businesses.”