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After scudding across 12 time zones to touch down in Southeast Asia, UNC students are ready to take what they’ve learned in their air-conditioned classrooms out to the humid field, Paul Wedel said.
For the past decade, they’ve been disembarking in Bangkok to work with the Thailand-based Kenan Institute Asia (K.I.Asia) — a non-profit affiliate of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise — to help Southeast Asian people and businesses establish and expand sustainable business practices that will energize the local economy without disturbing the natural beauty or local customs.
Since the 2004 tsunami decimated coastlines bordering the Indian Ocean, said Wedel, K.I.Asia’s executive director, “we’ve worked with the Kenan Charitable Trust to help the area recover on a long-term and sustainable basis.” K.I.Asia does this by partnering with institutions both in Asia and in the United States — namely UNC.
In Southeast Asia, Wedel said, outside investors often parachute in to build fancy hotels where locals have the skills to work only low-level jobs; meanwhile, the developments raise land and food prices, and the poor get poorer.
So K.I.Asia works with regional businesses, schools, the government and communities to help the locals get the education they need to get higher-paid jobs and develop independent businesses. UNC students pitch in to learn about and lend a hand with everything from the tourist industry to elementary education.
Students from the Kenan-Flagler Business School work with K.I.Asia’s small business experts to help hotels and tourism companies fine-tune their management and marketing strategies. Students from the School of Information and Library Science help businesses in Thailand’s Phang-nga region upgrade their web sites. And others from both the business school and the College of Arts and Sciences live for months in rural communities, where they help locals develop tours and attract visitors for a sorely needed economic boost; these students also take part in a program called “Junior Guides,” in which they teach English to local high-school students and introduce them to the tourism industry (and potential future careers).
In 2004, a group of Kenan-Flagler real estate students helped launch a project to develop a fisherman’s pier and boat repair shop that won funding from the Bush-Clinton Tsunami Relief Fund; it broke ground earlier this month, Wedel said.
And this summer, Wedel will advise a group of business students who’ll conduct marketing research for Phang-nga’s tourism industry during the rainy season, when business normally trickles away. The students will help identify the market segments right for the kind of tourism that harmonizes with local values, Wedel said. For example, about 40 percent of the people in Phang-nga’s coastal villages are Muslim, so there are strong feelings against typical tourist developments such as bars and night clubs.
Right now, Wedel said, a group of students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication is planning to build a multi-media web site highlighting the stories and ways of life along the coast of Thailand. Education students are in high demand for K.I.Asia projects, as well — both for improving science education and for teaching English as a foreign language.
This year’s cadre of student volunteers is now complete, Wedel said. But there’s still plenty of room on the junket for next year, and all UNC students are welcome aboard.
For more information, refer to www.kiasia.org.
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Margarite Nathe