Building support and leading advocacy for CI in Asia

Indrani Thuraisingham, Head of CI Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, reports on the activities of the region

It’s been a busy time in the Asia Pacific and Middle East region and I’m happy to be able to announce the completion of some important projects as well as the addition of two new members to the CI family.

First, welcome to our newest members:

• Consumer Rights and Services Organisation (CRSO), Afghanistan; and
• Yogyakarta Consumer Institute of Indonesia.

Second, I am excited to announce the upcoming release of our EU-funded video on the challenges faced by consumers in relation to sustainable consumption and production.

This six-minute video is a collaboration between CI and SWITCH-Asia, an EU-funded programme to promote sustainable consumption and production.

The video features stories from many typical households throughout Asia and their consumer habits as collected by SWITCH-Asia partners in China, India and Vietnam and the following CI members:  

• UBINIG, Bangladesh;
• Consumers Association of India;
• Foundation for Consumers, Thailand; and
• FOMCA, Malaysia.

The video will be shown at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil this month. It will be available for all to see on the CI website, and you can ‘like’ us on Facebook to keep up to date with this and all our activities for Rio+20..

Third, we successfully completed our seven-month programme of work in Nepal which looked at ways to develop the country’s consumer movement.

We found that getting more information into circulation through consumer education and awareness programmes and setting up clear and effective systems for redress are the best ways to boost consumer confidence and grow the country’s movement.

As part of the project, our office carried out training sessions, mapping of consumer organisations, exposure visits, and printing of IEC materials on consumer protection as well as organised the policy conference for government officials from the Department of Commerce and representatives of all of the consumer organisations in Nepal.

The programme was run under the auspices of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization through the EC-Nepal WTO Assistance Programme towards "making the consumer movement a viable market force" from September 2011 until March 2012.

Finally, I am pleased to announce that our office is currently leading CI’s work in two of the five global priority programmes as part of our new Strategy 2015. These are ‘Consumers in the Digital Age’ and ‘Consumer Justice and Protection’.

These two global programmes have a common agenda of engaging UNCTAD to revise the UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection to include access to knowledge, competition, financial services and e-commerce.

CI’s Dr Jeremy Malcolm attended the recent UNCTAD XIII conference in Doha, Qatar, to advocate for the inclusion of both consumer protection and access to knowledge issues in the outcome documents of the conference.

There were heated debates with governments from some developed countries about their desire to remove important references to the global financial crisis and climate change from the outcome text. It was due to the persistence of civil society organisations such as CI that most of those references were reinstated.

In the end, the outcome documents made a strong statement for the consumer movement, in particular the civil society statement which reiterated the eight consumer rights, and called for the revision of the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection.

Breaking ground in the fight for consumer rights in Asia Pacific and Middle East

Following the success of World Consumer Rights Day, Indrani Thuraisingham, Head of CI Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, explains why it’s an exciting time for the region.

 
 

World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) is a great opportunity to see the strength of our members in the Asia Pacific and Middle East region. This year, WCRD focused on consumer choice in financial services. Members from more than 23 countries in our region participated in events to mark the occasion.

Even the newly-formed, one-month-old consumer organisation in Afghanistan, the Consumer Rights and Services Organization (CRSO), (who is in the process of applying for CI membership) joined in by having the first-ever WCRD celebration in their country.

I travelled to Bangladesh to celebrate WCRD with the Consumers Association of Bangladesh, a CI member. There are more than seven million Bangladeshis working overseas and these workers often face high charges of between 5% and 20% every time they send money home.

We are working on this issue as part of our Global Money Transfers project.

In Bangladesh, if you want a copy of your bank statement urgently, you would need to pay USD10 for it. If you’re willing to wait up to five days, then you would need to pay only USD3. All this for your own bank account statement!

Our Consumers for Fair Financial Services campaign fighting for this to be something everyone should be entitled to for free.

The following day I was in India where I was one of the guests of honour at CI member Consumers Association of India’s 10^th anniversary international conference on the theme, ‘Is the consumer really the king?’ Here I talked about the need for consumer organisations to use Facebook and other social media tools to raise awareness on consumer rights and responsibilities.

Come and ‘like’ CI’s Facebook pageand see how we are using social media to raise awareness of consumer issues around the globe.

The CI regional meeting for Asia Pacific and the Middle East

Our office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East hosted the regional members’ meeting and conference: ‘Consumers in the Information Society: Access, Fairness and Representation’ in Kuala Lumpur. Fifty-one participants representing 37 organisations from 20 countries attended this meeting.

In-depth discussions were held on CI’s new strategic direction for the next four years and the five priority programmes that CI will focus on: financial services, food, consumers in the digital age, sustainable consumption, and consumer protection and legislation. In addition, our new strategy has a renewed focus on organisational empowerment; where CI helps members to help themselves.

Member organisations were reminded to be in continuous communication with CI on their activities in relation to CI’s priority programmes as well as emerging issues and concerns. This gives us the strength as a unified voice to collectively bring changes in terms of policy as well as corporations’ behaviour and practices.

One of these areas was taken up at the conference by CI's Director General Helen McCallum, who delivered a speech on emerging ICT technologies. The speech considered the networks we use to communicate (such as the Internet); the devices we use to do so (such as smartphones and computers); and the rules that regulate content passing through these devices and networks (such as intellectual property rights and privacy law). All of these are major issues for consumers in our region.

This office will work towards building a CI brand that is synonymous with consumer rights and protection. We will encourage and ensure all members from the region belong to at least one priority programme that is relevant to their work.

It’s an exciting time. We will form partnerships with relevant stakeholders to achieve our objective of bringing change, and look for strategic members to further strengthen our presence as the sole global consumer voice championing consumer rights.

We do this work because CI belongs to its member organisations; organisations that are fighting for consumer rights across the Asia Pacific and Middle East region.