Catalyzing Systemic Change in Southeast Asia - Bangkok 2024

[Music] hi good morning my name is chilling and um I'm from equitech Collective it's really good to be with all of you here I I used to live in Thailand um so some of my friends are there um for the for the past year and um uh it's now I'm in Singapore so it's good to be back uh after a yearlong surge um I'm sharing today about catalyzing systemic change uh in Southeast Asia uh and while the deck is being set up maybe I'll share a little bit about what equitech Collective does um the name equitech is a concatenation of two words equity and Technology um and it's really born out of the observation that we have a lot of incredible Tech talents in Southeast Asia and a lot of us actually have a history of working for big Tech um but also have a really uh deep commit to make the uh do redistribution in some form um because we realized that technology concentrates a lot of wealth but it also has the incredible power of redistributing that wealth um thank you thank you so much all right so let's start with um the word catalyzing what do we mean by catalyzing and what does systemic change uh really mean I'm going to start with this slide um how many of you have heard of um how many of you love planes like I do okay all right so uh just indulge me for for for a minute um I was traveling from Singapore to Thailand yesterday and um you know when you when you when you first get on the plane before the pilot takes off there's this woring sound of the engine right and then suddenly it becomes really loud it becomes like a roaring uh sound and that's actually the sound of the Apu the auxiliary power unit it is the small engine that compresses air and then sends the air back to the front of the plane so that small engine actually sits at the tail of the plane and it sends it back to the large engine so in other words it is the catalytic engine it is a small engine that starts the big engine because it would be too feel inefficient to start a big engine um and that is what we try to do here at acitech Collective we are the small engine that tries to catalyze larger scale systemic change um so we have a team of about 40 technologists coming from different parts of Asia but also the US um we come from public and private sectors a lot of us have worked in building software uh we're a team of product managers designers software engineers and we build stuff um so we specialize in working with partner organizations uh in Thailand but also in Southeast Asia to leverage technology to advance Equity um this is our vision we want to build a world where technology can be a transform transformative Force for a more Equitable future and uh we do this by catalyzing systemic breakthroughs this means we pick problem areas where technology small changes can make a big difference um and two domains that we work most in is Healthcare and education so why build tech for Equity I think um this morning we heard a lot about the digital economy of of Thailand and you know the startup space which is all really really exciting um hopefully we could really escape the middle-income Trap um but at the same time there's also a lot of people who are being left behind in every country's growth story and uh Thailand southeast Asia is no exception uh the 8 million people you saw that's contributing to agriculture for example um those are people that we we actually work quite closely with as part of our work as well um now some of you might have heard but in or have seen this uh really really good annual letter that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation publish they do this every year and I particularly like this year um now hundreds of millions of people live on less than $25 a day on the same planet where during the first 24 months of the pandemic billionaires wealth Rose more than it had in the 23 years prior and that's an astonishing statistic um just during covid years income inequality has has exacerbated significantly and just as needs am mounting low-income countries of fewer Resources with which to meet them a lot of countries are spending more on servicing foreign debt than they are on Healthcare so technology is a force for concentrating a lot of wealth but can it also redistribute it this is a photo I took in mesot um this is a place I spent a lot of time in it's up in Northern Thailand it's on the border of Myanmar and Thailand um these are migrant workers from Myanmar who are packing flowers that you would see on the streets of Thailand um they're us usually used for ceremonies and temples and um guess how much they are paid to wrap these bundle of 50 flowers into a plastic bag each one which pack uh they they paid one bot each to pack 50 flowers so they count 50 flowers put them in um and then they just do this day in day out this is also not a stable form of income for them but they are very uh uh low cost and cheap source of labor for uh type employers especially in agriculture um a lot of them are not protected by minimum wage protections that Thailand affords for most people so they pay it's about $10 USD a lot of them are paid maybe about two3 $4 a day or less um and this is what a typical uh Community that's not far from the city actually not far from msort about maybe 30 kilometer drive away and this is what uh the conditions look like a very um I would say makeshift uh makeshift tarps and kits here they do go to school um migrant Learning Centers um but they come home to uh what is really a very basic makeshift setup at home um the good news is that there are solutions both existing and emerging that can improve and safe lives despite these challenges um but these Solutions need support or they wind up merely as Wast of potential um I was telling my friend tanil that it's really interesting we see this combination of um uh you know web three interest in public digital good digital public goods because I think this is really one underexplored area um web 3 is another source of capital that really can deliver great catalytic impact if it is placed in the right areas so equitech focuses on areas where small changes can make a big difference we build Innovation capacity we build digital products and systems and we also help to advance uh digital access in inclusion so in msot we run a coding boot camp for example for migrant students uh who actually are incredibly talented at coding but just never had the opportunity because they had no access to laptops or uh curriculum we also work on uh a lot of our work is around Healthcare this is um our one of our uh the thing that really got us started was this project to digitalize uh health records at the matal clinic a Mata Clinic serves about 250,000 people they are usually migrants uh and refugees along the border uh and they offer services anything from maternity maternal and Child Health Care um to malaria control all the way to inpatient and outpatient services so this is how the clinic looks like um patient records are currently all in pen and paper um and they sort in these uh warehouses there often a lot of transcription eras and data loss as a result of all of this existing on pen and paper um it is incredibly if you have anyone of you have actually maybe run a hospital or build a clinic um it systems are expensive it's unclear why but in the US for example it costs about $200 million to set up an IT system in a hospital um certainly they're not doesn't they're not going to be in Thailand serving populations here because it's not commercially viable um so often times these clinics end up with this kind of system you have baskets of electronic health records um and Records do get lost in transit and so people just have the entire medical history wiped because of that um not to mention of course migrants being very mobile populations these markets don't carry on uh carry with them um or follow them when they travel from town to town so um one of our Solutions was to build an affordable electronic health record system at 1% of the cost so uh we built this for five pilot sites in MAA clinic in less than a year um and the idea is to enable Clinic staff to use the mobile phones um to document records uh securely and safely um and it's a very low quod solution it's this one screen of the outpatient Department um that's currently using this it's a lot of autofilling that SA gives them a lot of time um but you can also see how nurses are now using phones to capture vital signs as well as uh uh digitalizing Records at source and what this enables is that uh more of our migrants can have own their own Healthcare records and when they travel and they move that stays with them at the same time uh it is also less uh liable to being lost uh because they also certain political sensitivities um you know sometimes records are confiscated by military governments um so so having them digitized is a lot safer so what it took from going to from zero to one is a small team right so I mentioned it's very small engine of eight people on the ground developing this uh we have Engineers flying in from Singapore but we are very very uh interested in also working with local developers in Thailand we've also trained bures Developers um for for this project I think in interest of time I won't go into the video um but this is one of the things we do how do we build for sustainability is we trained Burmese migrants students to code and so they in turn sustained and maintain these systems in the long run this does a few things it helps to keep our systems lowcost sustainable but it also gives them jobs and livelihoods so they could also apply for future software engineering jobs after they stin with us um another project I'll share with you in terms of how we catalyze systemic breakthroughs is to solve the problem at root um a lot of problems with migrants in Thailand is the problem of undocumented um they are considered invisible population because they are stateless they might not have the passports from Myanmar they don't have official recognition in Thailand so they don't have access to Justice education Healthcare so how do we really solve this at root um we partner with local NOS um such as uh safet the children Thailand um to develop digital identity systems um the challenge for undocumented individuals and there are more than 1.2 million this was about 2 years ago but with the recent circumstance in Myanmar it's probably grown to about 2 million uh or Beyond um only about 13% of students are accessing Public Schools um and it's I remember I was in mesan and I was talking to to these students and they were like oh yeah the police would stop us so if we get stopped we have to pay a fee it's like a protection fee to the local police um and that's just because they don't have documentation there's a lot a lot of barriers and so what we' have worked on is a more Tech enabled Pathway to documentation um by really going from awareness to data collection legal consultations all the way to applying for official documentation for these students um and it's a three-part process we built a Tex stack to both triarch to case manage um and to identify these students over time so that they their records also carry with them um a lot of them don't even have birth certificates because in Thailand if you're born the first 14 days you have to apply to get a birth certificate if you miss that window it's really really challenging um so with this system we accelerate data collection and enable uh parents and students to know what they actually are eligible for in terms of citizenship or residency um through our systems we also capture school records um to enable them to have a much smoother application process uh what happens otherwise is that they pay dis honors Brokers like 4,000 USD USD just to get quote unquote Fast Track um to get documentation which for a lot of migrants that's their life savings and that's there's no guarantee that they could get it so scams for documentation is also a very common phenomenon in Thailand um so I I just wanted to really draw attention to this issue because that 8 million people you saw in that pyramid earlier on on the slide um actually significant of them of course are Thai people but many of them are also migrants um who have very little protection all right so this um so this is a second example of how technology can really be catalytic um it doesn't replace of course people it doesn't replace good policies we still need actually good policies the heart of it but it can accelerate good intent or scale and amplify good intent U the last project I'll shared that acch has been working on is to bring AI to lower resource settings um we haven't started working in Thailand for this one but we started in Teo Lee um our work spans uh across southeast Asia so Timol EST is um one of our recent Partners uh where we we discovered one problem um and this problem is uh that of primary care in t EST so this this is Dr Maria Des Santos she is a primary care physician in her Village she serves about 3,000 people she has two years of medical school training in Spanish because all medical school students in timless they would go to Cuba to get trained because they don't have local capacity to train their doctors so they learn medicine in a language that's not their native language so imagine me learning medicine and I don't know Chinese which I'm terrible at um but and then they come back and they have to practice medicine in tun which is the local language uh and you can imagine how much Get Lost in Translation and how little support they get so what happens right A lot of these doctors um actually get help on a WhatsApp track group so Dr Maria would you know see a patient and go okay I don't really know what to do um go to the backro WhatsApp Whata track group of 200 doctors wait for a response and come back for to to do something with the patient and I don't know about you but I've got like four people in my family track group and I get 10 responses for every question I ask so the conflicting responses and and inaccuracies of responses can be a big Challenge on the ground in healthcare so um what AquaTech has built is a co-pilot um that is that integrates AI into WhatsApp which is already a very commonly used platform um in team orese and it's trained based on local clinical guidelines and this allows them to uh this localization is really important because you don't want to AI to be returning things like uh OIC for a drug as a drug treatment for diabetes when OIC does not exist in t- ore right or even ECG uh when that is not part of teamor late it's infrastructure so localization is really important um and finally it's about being community-led right how do we enable doctors to upvote and downvote responses because of course AI still suffers from some problems around around hallucination and that's we need to be very very cautious around um so this is where real intelligence meets artificial intelligence uh we have a platform that enables uh doctors to curate and moderate and continuously train the bot so it returns increasingly uh more accurate answers so collectively um this raises the Baseline of Medical Care in teor leste uh We've piloted this with about 50 doctors in the midst of rolling this out to a, 00 doctors in t last day and uh in the next phase we hope to also make this available for midwives nurses uh non doctors um Tim Le say is not a big country is 1.5 million people but only 30% of them actually uh 30% of newborns receive uh medical attention from midwives so the other 70% uh they're born without much medical support so um for countries with much lower resources um AI could be really really catalytic okay so um yeah just to share a little bit about our road map for the next 12 months we are working on on device AI as well for remote clinics that have uh more intermittent or no internet access um and we also looking to in improve the language accuracy um tat tune until our project was not part of Google translate um so we actually worked with Google to include a new language as well um into Google translate so now we have to tune cool so um I'll just end off this presentation with a few um just Reflections systemic change is really about changing defaults defaults as in how what is the Baseline experience that PE lift experience that people have it's not necessarily about giving but about changing the conditions or the air that we breathe right um and catalytic change happens when these things come together so this is what the Apu looks like um when Talent ties treasures and time combust really magical things can happen um acch really is a story of talents who are skilled in you know building stuff and Technology ties the bonds that we have with our ground Partners Treasures some of our Fel Tropic funders that make this work possible and finally time people who volunteer at the time not all of us are full-time staff there are a lot of volunteers and we always welcome more volunteers and developers or specialists in development work um so if that's any of you here i' love to connect um and it is at first imperceptible this systemic change but then it is it becomes autous with time and over time hopefully we can get to what Mark Weiser who's the father of computing talks about which is that the most profound Technologies are those that disappear they weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life such that they indistinguishable from it so hopefully our EHR system disappears in that you know our patients don't even know it exists but to get a really good experience hopefully that children grow up with identity by default instead of having to fight their whole lives to get recognized and hopefully doctors can serve the patients with much higher quality clinical decision support um at with something that's really just in the pocket so that's um that's us um I'm chilling U very happy to meet all of you and welcome uh to follow us on LinkedIn to see what we're up to in the next couple of uh months ahead and uh maybe I think have some qu time for questions I no okay yeah thank [Applause] you thank you so much she that was really inspiring and I think a lot of lessons for us to learn in web 3 too from the stuff you changed about how the technology has to disappear web 3 also needs to eventually disappear at some point if we want to succeed [Music]