#40: Connecting Southeast Asia With Tech
How Joanne’s experiences in life led her to build a tech for good community in Southeast Asia, and what she wants to achieve with it
Welcome to this week’s edition of SEAmplified! We amplify the voices of youths and unravel our shared culture and lived experiences in Southeast Asia.
Reading time: 7 minutes
🔥 Trailblazers
Trailblazers features young startup founders, social leaders, and cultural mavericks in Southeast Asia.This 31-year-old Singaporean Wants To Forge A Shared Identity Across Southeast Asia With Tech
At first glance, I thought Joanne Tan, 31, was living a highly successful life that many might have dreamed of.
She achieved six distinctions at ‘A’ Levels, received a scholarship during her undergraduate days, and recently completed her master's at Cambridge. She has had various professional stints across companies as diverse as an airport, a tourism agency, and an e-commerce company.
Today, Joanne is the co-founder of GoodHub SEA, a non-profit initiative on a mission to use technology to scale social impact across Southeast Asia.
So when I met Joanne for the first time, I knew that I had to ask her: “What struggles have you faced in life so far?”
Without reservations, Joanne revealed that she struggled with limited options in her early schooling days.
Coming from a neighborhood secondary school, students had fewer opportunities to pursue their interests due to a lack of resources.
Back then, Joanne wanted to pursue her interest in geography. Instead, she was assigned to take up history as the school could not cater to the huge demand for geography classes.
“At that point, I wondered why we had to deal with this kind of situation when other schools out there could provide that flexibility of choice for their students,” she said.
Yet studying in a neighborhood school allowed Joanne to interact with peers from various academic and family backgrounds. It made her realize that people’s backgrounds can restrict their access to opportunities.
“For example, some students may not be able to learn a third language because their parents can’t afford to allow them to do so,” she explained.
She also found it fascinating that some of her friends who didn’t excel academically have gone on to start their own companies today, which broadened her perspective on what it meant to be successful.
This experience would plant a seed in her to make opportunities more accessible to everyone. In fact, the word “accessibility” popped up several times throughout our chat, which made it clear that enabling people to access opportunities is what’s close to Joanne’s heart.
But how did Joanne eventually enter the social impact space with a heart for Southeast Asia today?
Initial Exposure
In her first year of university, Joanne took up a part-time digital coordinator role at a social enterprise connecting people with good causes through tech.
“For example, if you can cook a meal we can connect you with say, the seniors living in nursing homes. And instead of cooking at the nursing home, we bring them to your house to try your cooking and forge connections.”
Little did she expect this stint to get her interested in volunteering. It even shifted her perceptions around it.
“It’s so much more than donating things to help someone,” she said, “I got to learn skillsets like connecting people with others while tackling the problem of loneliness amongst elderlies living in nursing homes”.
This spirit of volunteering would surface again during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Joanne was working from home while being employed at an e-commerce company, where she realized that many were starting ground-up initiatives to help those in need, such as giving online tuition for free.
But there was a problem. People didn’t know where to gain access to such opportunities, and others didn’t know who to seek help from.
“So I was like, why not try to compile everything into an online directory that will connect people with specific causes that they are passionate about?”
The directory was known as “How Can I Help SG”, built on Google Sheets with the help of a software engineer volunteer.
To her surprise, the directory quickly went viral, with many wanting to list new volunteering opportunities and some even thanking her for coming up with it. That was when Joanne realized how technology could be used to do good in society.
Growing Interest in Southeast Asia
For Joanne, it was her childhood experiences of visiting relatives in Malaysia during the Lunar New Year holidays that cultivated her interest in Southeast Asia.
“My mom is Malaysian, and we will take an eight-hour night train to her kampung (village), and reach at like say 4 AM in the morning,” she shared.
Joanne has never experienced life in a kampung. But the visits helped her to get a sense of a sense of solidarity where villagers would help each other in times of need—typically known as the kampung spirit—which some would say has disappeared in a concrete jungle like Singapore.
She would hear stories of village life, such as working in agricultural fields and rubber plantations. As the years progressed, she saw how villagers had to endure poor internet connectivity, with some eventually leaving for cities miles away for better opportunities.
Later on, Joanne had an opportunity to broaden her perspective on Southeast Asia by working in the tourism and e-commerce industries.
For instance, Joanne worked on social media campaigns to market Singapore to the rest of the region, and she had to learn and be mindful of the type of content that people in Southeast Asia consume. She also got to interact and collaborate with engineers in Indonesia and Vietnam while working at an e-commerce company.
These experiences came in handy when Joanne volunteered as a digital literacy ambassador at the ASEAN Foundation, where she forged new friends from across Southeast Asia.
“I got to better understand the problems that my friends who lived in villages were facing, especially those struggling with digital connectivity and literacy back home,” she said.
Joanne added that it was challenging to promote digital literacy in bigger countries like Thailand and Indonesia, where internet penetration rates are lower in rural regions.
“I think that a mix of all these experiences kickstarted a series of thoughts like: What can technology do? What can I do to help people in Southeast Asia? How can we tap into each other’s strengths and make an impact together?”
Building Connections
Just as Joanne was figuring out what to do, community leader Charles Lee reached out to ask if she would be interested to start GoodHub SEA together.
While she claimed to be attracted to the idea of building a team from scratch and combining Southeast Asia and technology, I wondered what she wanted to achieve.
After all, people who start non-profits must have good intrinsic reasons, since it is not as attractive as starting a profitable business.
“For me, I think it’s about building that kampung spirit of giving back and paying it forward, while using technology to help people understand Southeast Asia better,” she said.
It felt like a culmination of Joanne’s prior experiences. Little seeds had been planted as she explored her interests, which turned into an intrinsic passion to help social enterprises and non-profits across Southeast Asia to leverage tech to expand their impact.
With that, Joanne hopes to generate awareness of Southeast Asia amongst youths and get her volunteers to build empathy and professional skills by working with stakeholders. For instance, they recently faced project delays while working with a social entrepreneur who runs an organic farm in southern Thailand.
“So we learned that flooding has occurred in the village, and we were more concerned with how they’re doing rather than say a website that we are trying to help them build,” she shared.
At the same time, Joanne admits that they’re still in the process of figuring things out. This includes defining what success would look like, and searching for the right metrics to measure their impact.
“We want volunteers to gain practical skills, and get people to be more curious about Southeast Asia,” she said.
But I was more interested in finding out what Joanne wants to achieve personally, and what she envisions Southeast Asia to be like in the long run.
“I literally want to have friends in every country in Southeast Asia,” she declared.
To her, it would be more than just visiting other countries in the region as a tourist. She feels that eventually, we should all travel around Southeast Asia as a “citizen of Southeast Asia”, and embrace the idea of knowing exactly the location of every major city in the region, just as how people might pinpoint the location of their neighborhoods on a map.
While the idea of becoming a “citizen in Southeast Asia” might sound far-fetched for some, Joanne believes that it’s possible, and she has already embarked on a journey to achieve that.
For one, she has begun learning the numbers “one to ten” in all Southeast Asian languages. Which, at least in my opinion, is a great place to start.
Enjoyed today’s article? Follow SEAmplified on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn for more exciting and exclusive content, hit the subscribe button, and tell us how we did in the poll below!
Have a new idea or lead for a story, feedback on our work, or just want to say hi? Email us at hello@seamplified.com.