The new Official Diaspora Assistance
BUILDS NATIONS OF THE FUTURE

by Jeremaiah M. Opiniano
Institute for Migration and Development Issues

Published in BusinessMirror, http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/05292008/perspective01.html
(29 May 2008)


HANOI, Vietnam—Old-timers to this socialist country’s capital will tell you that Hanoi remains the same: swarming motorcycles that tell pedestrians to drive and walk at your own risk; many small businesses operating beside each other; and the abundance of rice fields amid today’s global rice crisis.

But many Asian attendees at a regional gab here were surprised with something else: Monies from offshore are swarming Asian developing countries, and can even lead to social and, obviously, economic development when maximized well.

“That’s why I’m here,” says Ho Chi Minh-based Australian Lynette Packer of Erigo Inc., an education-oriented nonprofit. “I want to explore possibilities.”

And these possibilities are enormous, Boston University’s Adil Najam said. His homeland of Pakistan has received some donations—as well as volunteer time—from compatriots in the United States: Cash is worth $250 million, while volunteer time is estimated to be thrice the amount of cash donations.

But as the Asia-Pacific Philanthropy Consortium (APPC), which organized the conference “Diaspora Giving: An Agent of Change in Asia-Pacific Communities?”, as well as Western philanthropic experts, sought to know more about the promises of what is called diaspora philanthropy, an ordinary Vietnamese-American told them the potentials of his sincerity.

$3M worth of sincerity
WHAT was the worth of that sincerity from nuclear scientist Dr. Doan Phung? $3 million.
The check was even turned over to Phung’s colleagues of the Vietnamese-American NGO Network (Vango), of which his Fund for the Encouragement of Self-Reliance is a member. His condition for the donation was that other NGO members of Vango must find counterpart amounts.

“Oh, no, more work for me,” said Vango official Binh Rybacki of Children of Peace International.
But diaspora-giving is as old as the movement of people to other countries for better opportunities: Najam even said there is a Pakistani-American foundation that’s 104 years old, giving back to the homeland for that long.
Research, as well as the response from nonprofits in the homeland countries of Asian diasporas, are moving slowly to respond to diaspora philanthropy, observes Dr. Mark Sidel of the University of Iowa.

Seven countries presented country papers, and India, China and the Philippines (all homes of the world’s largest diasporas) had advanced studies and practices of diaspora-giving. As for Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam, they are catching up.

The catching up, say many delegates, should be rapid: Asia is the second-largest recipient of all types of remittance inflows from migrants with $52.8 billion in 2006, says data from the World Bank; even if most of the interest of nonprofits and foundation experts to diaspora-giving is toward the United States, the world’s leading global migration basin and source country of billion-dollar remittances.

But look at the Philippines, Sidel says: “Donors even come from other countries, as low-skilled and middle-class workers also give.”

Case in point here is Damayang Pilipino sa Nederland, where vice president Basco Fernandez said a project proposal contest in the Netherlands that Damayan won led them to set up a community wet market in Magsaysay, Misamis Oriental.

A counterpart group in Misamis Oriental also provided backstop support such as pilot lending services and monitoring of the use of the money from Damayan. “Diaspora-giving will not work without help from the homeland,” Fernandez said.

Philippine NGOs and foundations were surprised at the scale, for example, of cash donations by overseas Filipinos: the last segregated amount from the country’s balance of payments, done in 2003, bared a $218-million single-year figure.

At that year’s exchange rate of P55, thus totaling P11 billion, ordinary overseas Filipino workers have more donations compared with the 35-plus-year accumulated total corporate giving by the Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP).

But all that diaspora donors like Ismael Fabicon, of the Romblon Discussion List-Cultural, Livelihood and Educational Association of Romblon (RDL-Clear), wanted to do was to simply help. Their giving to the home province of Romblon is not even that big.

Traveling from Banton Island in Romblon (which, if to include the boat ride from Odiongan to Manila, will take 16 to 18 hours) to Hanoi (some four hours from Manila, with a Ho Chi Minh stopover), Fabicon calls RDL-Clear “a unique virtual organization based on volunteerism [and] with an annual ‘peanut’ budget of less than $25,000 annually.”

The group even needs help in fundraising, Fabicon said, while NGOs from the homeland are also targeting the same diaspora donors.

The APPC’s conference tried to sort out issues of how diaspora philanthropy alone, excluding the billion-dollar remittances geared for families back home, can be made efficient and effective.

And among the many issues that confront NGOs, says executive vice president Barnett Baron of The Asia Foundation, is that diasporas distrust institutions as recipients “and would rather give to individuals so that there is direct help and personalized impact.”

What also remained mysterious to delegates was how the different uses of remittances—i.e., spending, saving, investing and giving—can be all maximized to design innovative socioeconomic development projects or even developmental investments.

Conference director Priya Viswanath of Charities Aid Foundation-India said she has yet to see such trend while wracking her brains on how charity-inspired diaspora-giving may lead to strategic philanthropy.

And Viswanath’s compatriot Shyamala Shiveshwarkar, a journalist, was quick to point out such possibilities in her country report: “Critical...was the government’s realization that an enormous reservoir of skills, talent, technology and resources was available within its diaspora that could potentially be harnessed to contribute to India’s growth and development.”

Market-based approaches are even being piloted in India, as in the case of the Deshpande Foundation that has projects to lower malnutrition and dropout rates among children in public schools, and which developed a prototype kitchen that sold food for 4 rupees a day per child.

And, for a long time, India floated diaspora bonds that saw nonresident Indians buying $6 million worth of these—with many of them wanting to buy more but being told that the offering has been closed.
Diaspora-giving is about “credibility transfer,” says Krishnakali Dasgupta of the American India Foundation, and who’s also a former Citibanker.

This is where Phung was consistent: He said he stayed at a cheap $40 hotel outside of the conference venue, Melia Hanoi, in his first trip to the homeland after six years.

He told the audience during his speech that he’s wearing an 11-year-old yellow suit and a six-year-old pair of shoes.
Somebody from the audience, a Vietnamese lady refugee to the US, asked: “Why is it that your wife is not here with you?”

Phung replied: “I have to save money.”