The Irrawaddy Magazine |
- Project to Get Burmese Medical Students in Clinics Sooner
- In Burma, Some Ex-Political Prisoners Heed Capitalism’s Calling
- The Irrawaddy Business Roundup (February 8, 2014)
| Project to Get Burmese Medical Students in Clinics Sooner Posted: 07 Feb 2014 06:29 PM PST  The University of Medicine 1 in Rangoon is the oldest medical school in Burma. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy) RANGOON — A select group of students from Burmese medical schools are starting a new program aimed at moving them beyond the classroom and into outpatient clinics earlier in their studies, as part of a larger push to improve the professionalism of doctors. Twenty students in their second year at the University of Medicine 1 and the University of Medicine 2 in Rangoon are making their first clinic visits on Saturday to observe doctors at work with patients. The doctors, private physicians from the Myanmar Medical Association (MMA), will serve as mentors to two students each, to discuss critical issues including autonomy, respect for patients and how to handle conflicts of interest. The mentorship program, only in its pilot stage this year, is a departure from the current system at the country's four medical universities, which are all government run. Usually students begin clinical work one year later, with less individual attention, and they spend their time in inpatient settings. The hope is that students can get a better understanding of positive doctor-patient relationships in an outpatient setting, where patients are less sick and more capable of discussing their options. "We want students to learn professional and ethical relationships between doctors and patients," says Dr. Win Zaw, a member of the MMA who helped select the students from a pool of about 150 applicants. Aung Soe, a professor at the University of Medicine 2, says that with the current system at his university, about five students are assigned to one attending doctor when they start clinical work in their third year of studies. A bigger problem, he says, is the student-teacher ratio in the classroom. "Actually, one teacher should have 10 to 20 students, but for our department one teacher has 125 students," he says. "I think it's not effective for teaching. They cannot learn well." He adds that it would be better if students could begin clinical work in their first year at school, as is the practice in some other countries. "At most medical schools in the United States, we start our clinical exposure as soon as we start medical school," says Myaing Myaing Nyunt, a Burmese doctor and public health researcher who helped design the mentorship program along with the Ministry of Health, the universities and the MMA. She went to medical school in Rangoon during the 1980s before moving to the United States, where she now works at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine. "In the West, and also in some Eastern countries, we have shown that this early introduction of young medical students to these doctors in the real setting, community setting, improves their understanding not only of the doctor-patient relationship, but also they have a more meaningful experience learning anatomy, physiology, biochemistry—these dry, extremely boring subjects." The doctor-patient relationship is crucial not only to improve the quality of medical care, she says, but also to protect doctors. "We are starting to see lawsuits here—the patients are questioning—which I have never seen in my life in Myanmar," she says. As part of the transition from military rule, Burma has in the past three years begun to allocate more funds to education and health care, although defense spending still constitutes a much larger share of the national budget. The government is working with international donors toward an ambitious goal of achieving universal health care by 2030, in a country where a majority of people currently lack access to hospitals and doctors. In the education realm, reformers are calling for greater autonomy for universities, which were tightly controlled by the former regime. The mentorship program is perhaps another sign of the growing desire for academic freedom. "In the graduate level or undergraduate level, schools are still government-sponsored programs. What we're doing is really taking the students with fresh minds out of these traditional programs and putting them in the hands of outsiders, of community physicians," Myaing Myaing Nyunt says. With funding from the Open Society Foundations, a grant-making operation founded by George Soros, she is also working to promote bioethics training for medical school teachers, as well as the development of the country's two Ethical Review Committees (ERC), which review the ethical soundness of research protocols. Burma has ERCs under the government's Department of Medical Research and the military's medical research center, but they are not currently up to international standards. "In the composition of the committee, a woman has to be included, community members have to be included, and somebody who is non-science or non-medical has to be included, to ensure there are different perspectives for the patient's sake," she says. She is helping the ERCs register for Federalwide Assurance (FWA), or an agreement with the US Department of Health and Human Services about ethical oversight. This US-led global standard for ethics committees is intended to ensure the protection of human subjects, and compliance is helpful for obtaining research grants. As Burma continues to seek international development assistance, she says institutional development is a crucial area that should not be forgotten. "Myanmar is the darling of the whole world right now, but that's not going to last long, and at some point people will go on with other popular countries," she says. "Foreign aid is good, but I think there should be a very constructive way to promote institutional development, investing in more long-lasting kinds of activities. This is why I don't just like doing workshops—it's a lot of money and a lot of time, and then people leave and nothing is left behind." The post Project to Get Burmese Medical Students in Clinics Sooner appeared first on The Irrawaddy Magazine. |
| In Burma, Some Ex-Political Prisoners Heed Capitalism’s Calling Posted: 07 Feb 2014 06:02 PM PST  Former political prisoner Kyaw Htwe signs papers at his office in Rangoon. (Photo: Simon Roughneen / The Irrawaddy) RANGOON — Kyaw Htwe's office is a well-lit and airy space on the sixth floor of a townhouse in Rangoon's Sanchaung Township, where he employs four people in a small car rental business and recruitment agency. "These two years, there has been low demand for car rental," he lamented. "Tourists are not asking for car rentals much, but the recruitment agency is not so bad for me," he said. "Interpreter, computer staff, some accountants, some admin.," he said, listing off the type of vacancies he is tasked with helping to fill. But running a business—even if the attendant stresses and disappointments are only tempered by occasional success—is a much better life, Kyaw Htwe said, than his old existence as a political prisoner. Just 22 when he was first jailed in 1990, Kyaw Htwe spent five years inside Rangoon's Insein Prison. "The whole prison life is in the cell, walking up and down, the cell measured 8 feet by 10 feet," he said. Zaw Ye Win is another former political prisoner who has gone into business since his release, before which he spent almost 13 years in a cell in Taungoo Prison, where he endured a routine as dull as Kyaw Htwe's was cramped. "They woke us up at 5:30am, to worship Buddha, whether I wanted to or not," he recalled, describing the start of a typical jailhouse day. "Then breakfast: some rice, that's all. Then wash. Then a short time to walk around. Then back to the cell, almost all day, but no book, no newspaper," he continued, summing up almost a decade and a half of what might have been spirit-crushing monotony. Kyaw Htwe was jailed the year Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won a national election, only to be denied office by Burma's military, and over the following years, thousands of other political prisoners were jailed, meaning that Kyaw Htwe sometimes had company in his tiny cell. "At times there were six people in the cell, otherwise just I alone," he said, counting on his fingers as he spoke. The company was welcome, but cramming half a football team into a room the size of a walk-in wardrobe meant much discomfort and no privacy. "No toilet, so we all had to share one little white pot," Kyaw Htwe said with a grimaced, his nose wrinkling at a pungent, two decades-old memory, even as he sat in his company's breezy, clean Rangoon office. After his release in 2011, Zaw Ye Win spotted an opportunity in Burma's slowly changing economy. Along with five old engineer pals, he set up Engine Doctor Engineering in 2012, a business that trains mechanics how to fix the thousands of new cars appearing in Rangoon since the reforming government allowed a change in the country's car import rules. "There are three or four other companies doing what we do, and the demand is high, as there are so many mechanics," he said, arm bent against the open bonnet of a gleaming new Toyota jeep, which was brought in to the engine doctors for some outpatient automotive therapy. Getting started in business was not easy, however, for those released before Burma's military junta stepped back and allowed a nominally civilian government to take office in 2011. "The military junta sometimes encouraged businesspeople not to do business with former prisoners," Kyaw Htwe said, a considerable hurdle given that army-linked businesses have long been central to Burma's economy. Bo Bo Tun, another ex-prisoner, set up a printing shop in downtown Rangoon in 1997, but as political prisoners were recycled in and out of jail during military rule, his shop drew the attention of Burma's spooks, eventually forcing Bo Bo Tun to close in 2008, before reopening in 2012. "Since the colleagues from political [activism] were coming and going frequently to my shop, the investigators were keeping watch on my shop since 2006. They came to our shop and watched what we were doing, copied our shop's phone line and listened to who we were communicating with. They also pressed the house owner [landlord] of my shop to drive me out. So I closed the shop," he recalled, speaking over the whirr of printers churning out paper. Bo Bo Tun's bond with former dissidents helped, as he now gets a lot of work printing for the NLD and the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society, the most prominent group of former political prisoners in Burma. Another former prisoner whose business suffered at the hands of a capricious junta was Ye Min, who was jailed from 2005 until 2013. During those eight years he was shuttled around five jails, from Dawei in the south of Burma to Putao in the far north, after a business deal went awry. "I won't say I was completely innocent," he said, "but like many others, I did not have a fair trial so I got no chance to show my innocence or not in court. That is where it should be decided, if I am innocent or not." While in Myitkyina Prison in Kachin State, Ye Min met Zarganar, the comedian and social activist whose voluble personality made him one of the better-known political prisoners and an international cause celebre. The two became friends and now collaborate in House of Media and Entertainment, Zarganar's media production company. But—as a businessman who previously helped foreign companies navigate the commercial minefield that was pre-sanctions Burma—Ye Min has a new niche in Burma's investment-magnet economy, opening the Business Alliance Hub and an adjoining hotel on Dhammazedi Road in Rangoon last year. The Business Alliance Hub is one of several office space-for-hire locations that have been set up in Rangoon—catering to visiting businesspeople and would-be investors needing somewhere with power and Internet to do some work while in town, in a city where electricity and web access can be spotty. Ye Min said his experience doing business in Burma—his other current interests include a garment factory in Hlaing Tharyar Township and a rubber plantation in Dawei, where he was previously in jail—mean that he can offer more to visiting clients than other business hubs, he contends. "I can help investors to find local partners and get connected," Ye Min said, cautioning that his assistance is conditional, however. "The first thing I ask an investor is, if you have a project for the benefit of the country, I will help you." Ye Min credits the prison's austere regimen with refining his work ethic. "In jail I woke at 5am, and I still do now. Every day. And I do the same exercises that I used to do in jail," he added. But for many other former political prisoners, the years in jail make it hard to make up for lost time, once free. "We had no time to learn in the jail, no chance to read, we lost our education time, our training time," said Kyaw Htwe. Typically, given their background, ex-political detainees have gone into politics, or activism, or media, after returning to the outside. But even in a country as diverse and fractious as Burma, there is a limit to how many political parties or NGOs can be set up, and only so much room for ex-prisoners in those organizations. Ko Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner who helped set up Golden Harp, a Rangoon taxi firm where three of the drivers are former prisoners, had to pause for thought when trying to think of other former political prisoners who had set up successful businesses after their release, even though he estimates that Burma could have jailed up to 10,000 political prisoners since 1962, the year the army took power. The Burma government said it would free all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience—categories it once denied existed—by the end of 2013, but the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) and other prisoner groups say that over 50 political prisoners remain in jail. For the thousands who have been freed, government policy has a lot to do with why so few former political prisoners have been able to set up a business, post-release, contended Bo Kyi, who is founder of the AAPP, an organization that long worked on the Thailand-Burma border to help political detainees. "The government is using a divide and rule policy," he said. "Some former prisoners need to report to the police, some cannot get licenses for business, some cannot afford it. The majority of former political prisoners are very poor." Many former political prisoners have struggled to find work, much less go into commerce, since their release into an economy coming out of several decades of misguided military rule and economic sanctions—and where unemployment is thought to be nearly 40 percent. Bo Bo Tun said the government has a responsibility to help former prisoners, given that they were jailed unfairly and many lost their youth to jail time. "Because of them, political prisoners were facing poverty during imprisonment and some have died both in jail and outside of jail because of the injuries received from prison," he said. Bo Bo Tun's anger was echoed by Tin Maung Oo, who was jailed four times between 1996 and 2008, struggling to maintain or restart several enterprises along the way. "Government should draw up policy in Parliament for that because they have responsibility for political prisoners' reintegration," he said. For a man with an engineering background like Zaw Ye Win, Burma's economic glasnost and a changing car market meant a business opportunity and a chance to jump-start a career stalled by a government that jailed many of its best and brightest. But he knows that such success is impossible for many other former prisoners. "Many political prisoners did not have any training or background to even get a job," said Zaw Ye Win. And for those former political prisoners who are running a business, there are the same challenges as those facing other entrepreneurs in Burma—where less than 30 percent of the population has electricity and less than 10 percent of people use a mobile phone or are online. "To set up business, [the] main difficulty is capital. If just myself alone, I can't afford it, so I collaborate with my friends involved in politics who have the same opinion with me," said Bo Bo Tun, a testament, on the one hand, to how difficult it has been to get loan in Burma's ossified, albeit now reforming, banking system; and on the other, to how the former political prisoner fraternity sometimes looks out for one another. "One of my political colleagues gave me his jewelry to use as capital," said Tin Maung Oo, discussing how he had to scratch around for money to restart his Rangoon glassware business after he was released. Some former prisoners are hopeful that business conditions will improve in Burma, as new laws are passed. "If we keep up the reform momentum, we will in time see our economy develop," said Ye Min. "If the government helps the people get land, and makes it easier to get project financing, then people will have a better chance to do business." Back at Engine Doctor Engineering, Zaw Ye Win's days are full. "We have around 15 customers a week, people whose cars we can diagnose or repair," he said. But most of the time is spent on teaching new tricks to some of Rangoon's thousands of old and young mechanics. "We have 15 staff, and so far have trained more than 400 mechanics," he said, clearly revved-up by the challenge of running a new and much-needed business in Burma's biggest city. The post In Burma, Some Ex-Political Prisoners Heed Capitalism's Calling appeared first on The Irrawaddy Magazine. |
| The Irrawaddy Business Roundup (February 8, 2014) Posted: 07 Feb 2014 06:01 PM PST Nissan to Spend $200M on Vehicle Factory in Burma Japanese automaker Nissan will invest more than US$200 million in an assembly factory in the Pegu Division north of Rangoon, a report said. Work on the factory, due to be operational by 2015, will begin once a land tenure agreement is negotiated, said Eleven Media quoting Burma's United Diamond Motor Company, part of Tan Chong Motor Holdings of Malaysia. Nissan was reported by the Japanese business news agency Nikkei last September to be planning a production plant in Burma. Nissan plans to "produce several thousand small passenger cars and pick-up trucks a year," said Nikkei. The vehicles will be assembled from parts built in other Nissan factories in the region, including Thailand, it said. Last year Japan's Suzuki Motor Corporation re-opened its Rangoon factory to build pickup trucks, producing about 100 vehicles per month. The factory had been closed down since 2010. New 5-Star Hotel in Rangoon Will 'Boost Tourism Industry' A new five-star hotel planned for Rangoon will help boost much-needed facilities for Burma's burgeoning tourism industry, said regional travel trade magazine TTR Weekly. The hotel will be the focal point of a shopping mall plus offices, and will include serviced apartments, said the magazine. A license to build the complex, details of which have not yet been given, has been awarded to Adventure Myanmar Tour & Incentives Company, "a well-known travel firm based in [Rangoon]," said TTR Weekly. The hotel and mall is to be built on land on Shwedagon Pagoda Road in Dagon Township, it said, quoting Rangoon's investment commission. The Ministry of Hotels and Tourism said in January that Burma had 2.04 million visitors in 2013, almost a doubling of the number in 2012. The main problem facing Burma's tourism industry was insufficient accommodation for visitors, said TTR Weekly. Burma's Rice Industry Probing New Markets in European Union Burma is test-marketing quality rice to European countries as part of an agreement with the European Union, said the Myanmar Agribusiness Public Corporation (MAPCO). Another batch of quality rice is also being shipped to Japan, MAPCO director Soe Tun was quoted as saying by Eleven Media. Japan is helping Burma's rice industry to develop new disease-resistant varieties with better crop yield for what MAPCO said was an "emerging market that specializes in top quality products." "We are now preparing to export 6,000 tonnes of rice that have already been awarded the tender. Japan is going to buy native paddy strains and [Burma] is now test exporting high-quality rice to European countries," Soe Tun said. Army Land Theft a Thing of the Past, Claims Burma Govt More than 150,000 acres of land confiscated by the Army in recent years is to be returned to its previous holders, according to Deputy Minister of Defense Major-Gen Kyaw Nyunt in a parliamentary statement. "There are no more land seizure programs in the armed forces but instead land give-back programs," he claimed. The Army has already returned about 10,000 acres, and "partially given back" 26,512 acres, Kyaw Nyunt said. However, these promises come against a background of continuing reports of land seized by military units or businesses linked with the Army. The Irrawaddy reported last month on a British parliamentary statement of concern about land clearances in Shan State in connection with an Army-linked commercial teak logging operation adjacent to a planned hydro dam on the Salween River. The British parliament heard about Shan Human Rights Foundation allegations that villagers in Murng Paeng Township are being used as forced labor by Burmese soldiers providing security for "military-linked logging operations above the planned Ta Sang Dam." Conference Organizers Hope Mobile Banking Will Spur Economic Growth in Burma Burma's economy could be drastically reshaped through the fast adoption of banking via mobile phone, organizers of an e-commerce conference in Rangoon claim. "[Burma's] transformation and investment in internet and mobile infrastructure will enable banks to launch safe and simple payment solutions," said a statement from one of the conference participants, Mastercard. An outline of how this could be achieved will be presented at the Mobile Payments and E-Commerce Asia Pacific Summit, to be held in Rangoon February 13-14, said organizers Magenta Global of Singapore. "The emerging economies in this region are likely to see a huge increase in mobile subscribers who are mostly unbanked," said Magenta Global chief executive Maggie Tan in a statement. "Banks must implement at least one mobile banking offering, either via messaging, mobile browser or an app-based service. Some banks are already doing so with larger banks deploying two or more of these technologies. This [conference] has been specially convened to take the industry forward." The Rangoon conference, with participants from Thailand, Cambodia, India, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Pakistan and China, will discuss how Burma's e-commerce can benefit from the expected development of new mobile phone networks and nationally available Internet, said Tan. The post The Irrawaddy Business Roundup (February 8, 2014) appeared first on The Irrawaddy Magazine. |
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