by Jeffrey Gutman,

Director Strategy and Operations, East Asia and Pacific Region

World Bank

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am very pleased to be able to join you once again for this regional meeting of the East Asia and Pacific Region’s Distance Learning Centers and its partners, and I welcome this opportunity to review the progress in our joint efforts since we last met.

Significant achievements have been made since our meeting in November last year.  To start my statement, I would like to welcome the new members, which have joined our network, first and foremost our gracious hosts, the Shanghai National Accounting Institute, and as many of you would recall, the Tokyo Development Learning Center.  In addition, we are looking forward to launching four new centers by the end of the year in Indonesia, a new DLC in Ho Chi Minh City, one in Cambodia, and plans are well advanced for a number of new sites here in China.

During the Singapore meeting we set ambitious targets for what we aimed to achieve by the time of this meeting.  Key amongst the initiatives that I indicated that the Bank would support were: setting up of EAPA committees; developing an EAP GDLN pricing model; providing technical assistance to rework DLC Business Plans; and to take the first steps in developing a regional EAPA Business Model.  Today I would like to review progress against these targets and to identify new challenges that have emerged – largely as a result of the analytical work we have jointly undertaken in recent months. 

I am very pleased that several DLC management teams have made significant steps in revising their business plans. As a result we now have new Business Plans for Tokyo, Viet Nam, Australia and PNG.  Later this week Ravi Corea will lead us in a discussion on lessons we have learned as a result of Business Plan development and on policy issues that have emerged as a consequence.  I am also pleased to note that Business Plans are also being developed in several other DLCs and that Ravi will present his ideas on an EAP GDLN Model during this meeting.

Also on a positive note there I a delighted that there has been excellent within-region collaboration on setting up EAPA committees for Technology and Marketing.  I am greatly looking forward to the discussion we will have later in this meeting on how these committees will work and on to discuss how we can start work on the third committee which will concentrate on program quality.

We have also made a lot of progress in developing a pricing strategy for the GDLN and here I would like to thank Monika and Ravi for their excellent work on this central issue.

Our World Bank EAP team have scaled up use of the GDLN for high profile events and, over the last few months, we have focused on using the GLDN to  release key research studies.  Major publications have been released through the GDLN for:

·        Global Production Networking and Technological Change in East Asia -which presented some of the latest findings on global production networks and evolution of technological developments in East Asia.

·        Global Change and East Asian Policy Initiatives - which presented specific policy responses to guide the East Asian economies through periods of economic, political and technological turbulence.

·        The Half Yearly East Asia and Pacific EconomicUpdate; which was released by our Vice President, Jamil Kassum and our Chief Economist, Homi Kharas. 

Finally I made a commitment in Singapore to integrate the GDLN into Bank training and operational activities.  It will take a little time before we see the results of the work we are now putting into this initiative but I can assure you significant progress is being made.  We are now looking at directing a portion of the region’s Bank staff training budget through the GDLN.  I am also working with EAP staff to better inform operational teams on how to use the GDLN in their day-to-day activities.  Last week I attended a team workshop with our External Affairs colleagues in which the GDLN was identified as a core component of the EAP region’s outreach activities.  As I said earlier, we still have a long way to go on this issue – but we have started and have generated a lot of momentum.

GDLN business is growing within our DLC network.  Based on last quarter’s utilization indicators that have been provided by Monika and her team I am pleased to report that GDLN sessions have almost doubled to around 30 percent, with the highest utilization rates being in Timor Leste, Viet Nam and the Philippines.  Of course GLDN utilization is only one criteria that should be used to evaluate DLC performance, and in terms of evaluating GDLN performance, I place at least equal weight on the quality of GLDN broadcasts.  It is for this reason I am keen to assist this group’s work on developing a EAPA Program Quality Committee because I firmly believe that we cannot survive without gaining and maintaining a reputation for excellence in everything we do.  And by that I mean from our interaction with clients through to the professionalism with which we conduct our business and the quality of the content we broadcast.

So there are a lot of things that we can be take pleasure in having achieved. And there are some exciting content initiatives underway which include the corruption series KDI is leading and the discussions that the Bank will be undertaking with partners in the region on donor Harmonization. 

However big challenges still remain and the business emphasis of our meeting over the next few days is appropriate.  I believe it is important for us to use our time here together to  identify next steps that will lead us toward a sustainable and developmentally effective EAP GDLN.  At the end of the day DLCs are medium sized enterprises that face exactly the same challenges as do any other similar businesses.  DLC managers need to generate income if they are to keep their DLCs in business.  The best, and perhaps only, way for this to be achieved is by developing robust business plans which point the way to high effective development outcomes, well managed DLCs, and reliable income streams. 

As you can see by the participation of Le Vu, Monika Weber and Austin Hu at this meeting – senior World Bank management is committed to assisting our GDLN vision to become a reality.

I am very much looking forward to hearing the views of everyone during the next several days and intend to actively participate in the meeting myself.

Thank you.

(China.org.cn July 27, 2004)