Southeast Asia Development Solutions (SEADS) Hackathon Launch
Re-establishing Tourism Confidence through Innovative Digital Solutions

Session Background:
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has launched a series of solution hackathons that focused on providing real solutions to specific problems.

Southeast Asia depends on domestic and international tourism for sustainable economic growth. COVID-19 has widely disrupted tourism, resulting in significant job losses and overall economic productivity. Tourism confidence, both international and domestic, will be critical for long term Southeast Asia economic recovery. While health and safety will be the main consumer focus, innovative solutions will help offset concerns, provide guidance, assist with overall planning, and most importantly, provide a sense of security and peace of mind.

As cross-border travel slowly resumes in Southeast Asia, and the region starts to recover from the economic impacts of COVID-19, significant innovation will be needed for long-term inclusive tourism recovery. Providing reliable information on tourism businesses’ health and safety protocols, along with reliable travel information and advisories, can help ensure that guests feel safe, boost tourists’ confidence, and drive tourism recovery. To help Southeast Asia’s small and medium-sized tourism businesses endure the COVID-19 downturn, how can we use digital technology to provide health and safety information, or develop consumer products and services, that restore confidence to travel? With this in mind, ADB will be launching on 21 October the SEADS Hackathon: Re-establishing Tourism Confidence through Innovative Digital Solutions.

Objective of the Session and Benefits:
This session aims to launch the ‘Re-establishing Tourism Confidence through Innovative Digital Solutions’ Challenge, encourage ADB staff to spread the challenge in their respective networks, encourage participants to join, and explain the opportunity to pilot test the solution and its potential impact to the tourism industry. The virtual challenge will run throughout 2020. In early 2021, the most successful pilots will be recognized. The competition is open to startups, companies, universities, research organizations, students, and ADB employees. Details can be found on ADB’s challenges platform. The platform allows ADB to reach global problem solvers and collaborate with them in co-creating solutions. The platform currently has a network of 2,000 users, including hundreds of startups, located in 70 countries.

Building a More Agile Government through Cloud Computing”

Session Background:
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has been a significant driver of the last industrial revolution and continues to transform the global economy today. There are discussions that recent advances around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, and broadband connectivity constitute a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Cloud Computing is the foundation of these and many other technologies that are transforming the world today. The role of public cloud in economic development is profound and its importance is capturing the attention of government policy makers and development practitioners.

Most policy makers understand the role Cloud Computing can play in improving delivery of services to citizens but often do not feel confident in developing or effectively implementing policy frameworks to address concerns about data protection, privacy, cybersecurity, and cross-border data transfers. The level of maturity among the different countries include diverse cloud framework development, adoption, implementation, and acceleration.

The session will explore how Cloud Computing can help accelerate an organization’s mission. We will address lessons learned from different government organizations about their Cloud journeys and share how public cloud is a key driver of economic opportunity, how it can promote a more secure, effective, and innovative government, as well as explore policy frameworks for public cloud and present a template for best practices in the digital economy.

Objective of the Session and Benefits:
The objective of the session is to raise awareness of Cloud Computing’s potential benefits, particularly in times of crisis, as well as the issues/risks and relevant mitigation strategies. Additionally, the benefits of governments adopting Cloud First and Native policies to deliver top-tier services and drive economic development and the best practices in regulations and policies addressing public cloud adoption. We seek to share insights, knowledge, and inspiration with participants to further their understanding of Cloud and how governments can transform themselves into innovative citizen-centric service delivery organizations while upskilling their work force and improving standards of living.

                                                            Startups and the Post-COVID Recovery

Modern Government: Empowering people. Enhancing governments: Enabling societies.

Session Background:
Microsoft, with our extensive global partner ecosystem, supports governments worldwide by driving and powering digital transformation to help them enhance their services, influence positive societal change, and promote the well-being of people and communities. We do this by delivering services and platform capabilities that focus on trust, innovation, security, and compliance.

In this session, we will discuss how best to meet your unique organizational mission enabling remote government, empowering cross agency collaboration and delivering trusted and secure services.

Utilize the power of our innovative platform capabilities to do more and achieve more for the institutions, businesses and people you serve.

Objective of the Session and Benefits:

1. Understand the current imperative for Governments in Asia Pacific to do more with less;
   
2. Articulate a vision of what future success would look like for your Government agency;
   
3. Learn from other countries’ experiences undergoing digital transformation;
   
4. Dive deep into three key scenarios in the Public Sector: Enabling remote government access; empowering cross-agency collaboration; and delivering trusted and secure services. 
   
5. Develop a capacity building plan to ensure that civil service is prepared to transform;
   
6. Seize the opportunity to impact the broader community with a comprehensive national skilling program, in partnership with Microsoft Philanthropies.

A Cross-generational Consultation on Youth Jobs in the Digital Economy
Invitation Only

Session Background:
A Cross-generational Consultation on Youth Jobs in the Digital Economy is a SEADS 2020 Partner Session hosted by the ADB Youth for Asia initiative. The highly interactive online session will convene key government stakeholders and young people from the Southeast Asia region to demonstrate and promote the benefits of cross-generational meaningful youth engagement. The session will identify how the pathways towards achieving an inclusive Digital Economy can influence future country-specific projects and policies influencing youth jobs and livelihood and further knowledge and capacity building activities around the topic within the region. Participants will engage through consultative breakout rooms, facilitated discussions, a live-visual recording using Miro and online polling.  Participation in this session is invite-only. For further inquiries, kindly reach out to youthforasia@adb.org.

Objective of the Session and Benefits:
Session Participants will:

• Create a compelling positive inter-generational experience that identifies the potential of youth inclusion and ADB’s ability to support governments agencies across sectors with meaningful youth engagement tools and processes;
  
• Conduct a multi-sectoral and cross-generational consultation related to sub-themes on improving youth livelihoods in the Digital Economy; and
  
• Identify country-level recommendations and actions to be taken forward as an output of the discussions.
  

Moderator:
Adam Sharpe, Youth for Asia Champion and Director of Learning at Metafuture

Speakers:
The session is designed for all participants to contribute and provide their insights through breakout groups, live-visual recording through Miro and polling throughout.