Policy analyst heavily influenced by Salzburg Global session on rural enterprise
A policy analyst at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has revealed how she’s been inspired by Salzburg Global’s session format.
Ji Eun Chung took encouragement after attending the session, ‘Africa’s Growth Engine: Partnerships for Rural Enterprise and Impact at Scale’.The session, co-organized with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), brought together a number of participants to discuss rural enterprise development in Africa.
Chung said: “Since working at the OECD, I haven’t been looking into a lot of development issues and by coming here for two days I’ve heard a lot about different activities that are going on in developing countries.
“In the future if there are any forms of conferences happening, it will be very useful to have this type of conference where you’re actually benefiting from expertise from all different areas and everybody’s participating and you’re not missing out on useful lessons.”
This particular session had a connection to her master’s thesis. Chung holds an M.A. in public policy from Seoul National University.
“My master’s thesis topic was about rural entrepreneurship and rural leadership development. When I heard about the topic I thought, okay, I’ve been losing touch with this area, let me go back and really refresh my mind about what’s happening.”
In her role, Chung works on a survey of adult skills, looking at the competencies of adults aged 16-65 in 24 countries. She assesses their skills in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving.
“At the beginning I thought there wouldn’t be any links between my current job and this topic, but now I’ve participated here I realize that there is a lot of links between the two.
“There was a huge link there saying a lot of adults and youths do not have the right skills and entrepreneurship training courses to be able to benefit from rural entrepreneurship and develop their rural areas.”
Chung described the seminar style as a bit different from what she usually experienced, but this helped lead to interesting discussions.
“Here at Salzburg there was active participation and you have group discussions on different topics and you interact a lot with the people and network with the participants. That brought a lot of changes in the mindset, learning what others have experienced.”
She described how a fellow participant from Ghana told her how there were so many different international agencies starting from international donors, local governments and public officers who were now all launching similar programs.
“It seems like a lot of things are happening but there are lots of overlaps and obstacles that are hindering them from achieving a certain level.”
Chung said when discussing capacity development of rural entrepreneurs, she found they lacked basic literacy and numeracy skills, which was an issue that need to be addressed first.
“Before we even talk about rural entrepreneurship, I think there aren’t enough fundamental and basic skills in place [for them] to actually understand what’s going on.
“A lot of the farmers don’t even know how to read or write. It’s difficult to use the mobile technology to communicate. There’s a digital divide there, not because of the digital technology itself but because of the literacy.
“In my mind, before we go into the big concepts it’s very important to first sort out the basic skill levels so that these adults can learn as well.”
