Modernizing the cooperative

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Seneres

MANILA -- The technology gap in the Philippines, meaning the time it takes for a foreign technology to be adopted here would probably range from one year to a hundred years or more, depending on the factors surrounding the adoption. This is also true in the case of information & communications technology (ICT), a set of technologies that is basically foreign in origin.

In some cases, there are several local attempts to adopt a foreign technology early on, but for some reason or another, there is a failure of adoption. This is true in the case of e-commerce in general, and in the case of business-to-business (B2B) web portals in particular. This would also include other types of portals, such as business-to-consumer (B2C) and government-to-government (G2G).

In a manner of speaking, the emergence of e-commerce web portals is supposed to have a democratizing effect, in the sense that it would have given small & medium enterprises (SMEs) the opportunities to sell their products and services without incurring the high costs of advertising and promotions.

As of now, there are about 30,000 cooperatives of all types in the Philippines , more or less. By themselves, all the cooperatives taken as a whole would be like a micro economy on their own, capable of selling to each other (B2B) or to their own member-customers (B2C), totally independent of the bigger and broader economy.

As I see it, there are three levels of ICT adoption, namely personal, local and global. The personal level is self-explanatory. The local level on the other hand would mean inter-personal communications at a local setting like an office such as a local area network (LAN) or in a community such as a wide area network (WAN). The global level would mean no other than the Internet, a network of computers around the world bound together by Internet Protocol (IP).

Speaking of the Internet, it is not just one technology because it is a giant set of technologies, also bound together by IP. Going back to the subject of technology adoption, several Internet technologies may already have been adopted in the Philippines , but there are many other such technologies that have yet to be used here. Just to emphasize the technology gap, Internet 2 is already being used in the United States for a long time now.

When I was the Director of Science & Technology and also in-charge of technology transfer at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), I brought in a foreign consultant who is an expert in economic intelligence. I assigned him to Davao City where he was tasked to look into the marketing problems of cut flower producers there. In his final report, the consultant said that the reason why the five star hotels in Metro Manila are not buying cut flowers from Davao , is because they do not know what is available there.

In several meetings that I conducted with leaders of the cooperative movement in attendance, we concluded that cooperatives of all types could actually go into the ICT business, providing all kinds of ICT related services such as telephony, mobile messaging, cable television, Internet Service Provider (ISP) and distance education, among others.

Much as I see the potential of cooperatives going into all kinds of ICT related businesses, I see the need for their members and leaders to graduate from the personal level of computerization all the way up to the local and global levels. It would even be good if they could graduate from the LAN and WAN experiences as they discover the Internet.

In consultation with Dr. Benjie Teodosio who is a long time leader of cooperative organizations, we realized that cooperatives could actually provide distance education to about 3 million out-of-school youth all over the country using satellite television and actually earn decent revenues from the service, potentially turning the service into a social enterprise as well.

Also in consultation with Mr. Rodolof Cañeda, another leader of cooperatives, we also concluded that a B2B portal would be a great help in modernizing their global marketing efforts, thereby increasing their revenues by broadening their markets. It does not take much effort to help in the modernization of these cooperatives. Let us work together to help them.

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