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Taiwan Model

Taiwan’s Health Tech success lies in Global South Collaboration

Taiwan’s Health Tech success lies in Global South Collaboration

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Even though Taiwan’s health tech has prevented the pandemic, MedTech regulations specialist Hasnaa points out that establishing a closer connection with the global south is the key to make Taiwan a leader in innovation of health tech.

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Taiwan’s Health Tech success lies in Global South Collaboration

By Hasnaa Fatehi
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Finding one’s Covid calling

In October, I had the chance to attend the 2020 International Symposium on Covid-19 at Academia Sinica. Dr. Jason Wang, Director of Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention at Stanford University, gave an excellent presentation where he suggested Taiwan should collaborate with the emerging market leader in Pharma, and home to the largest vaccine manufacturing site in the world, India.

Dr. Wang added that while the Serum Institute of India (SSI) is going to get really busy manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines, Taiwanese companies could leverage local capabilities to focus on producing syringes, needles, packaging and sterilization solutions to support the delivery of the first world-wide vaccination campaign. This was my first aha moment.

The second was at a start-up DemoDay on Minimally Invasive Surgery in Taipei. To my biggest surprise, investors who had dialled in from Europe and the US, recommended vaccines and Covid-19 test development be left to those who are already in the field.

They explained: a far more strategic move for Taiwanese start-ups would be to think past the pandemic and use this “free” time to focus on leading the industry in providing solutions for the long-term complications that are arising in patients who contracted Covid-19. “

It does not make sense to enter the race just because one thinks there is a market” (I am paraphrasing).

Attracting talents

I applied for the Taiwan Gold Card employment visa in May 2020 and was approved mid-June. Soon after, I found myself in an exclusive group of predominantly white male (approx. 90% of Gold Card holders are male) from the US. The questions and issues I was asking were not always picked up. After much struggle and feeling of isolation, I started my own Line group, the Gold Womxn, where female and/or minority identifying Gold Card holders were welcome to join. I also started reflecting on the reasons for that and had to go back to my own Gold Card application.

The most straightforward path to obtaining a Gold Card is to demonstrate that you earned a salary of at least 160K NTD per month in the past 3 years, this is how I obtained mine. 

Thinking through who makes at least 160K NTD a month and where they could come from, led to another question.

Who decided this number and is it benefiting Taiwan at all?

The more time I spent thinking about it, the more I wondered whether the criteria to apply for the Gold Card were designed to speak to males from Silicon Valley only. Perhaps these criteria were suggested by a population of biased westerners in Taiwan.

Or was it simply not given much thought and this is what we ended up with? Of course, I don’t know the answer to that, and I am sure a lot more thought was put into it. But the Gold Card program still does not attract enough people, a quick calculation showed the average approval rate is a little over one application per day. The program started in February 2018 and to date, 1,3xx Gold Card visas have been granted.

Redefining success

The real effects of programs like the Gold Card can only be seen in a decade or more. However, one short-term way of measuring the Gold Card program success could be the “retention rate”, particularly once the pandemic is over. Would all the VVIP pandemic refugees stay past that and contribute to nation-building (a Singaporean IRAS Moto) or would they go back to their home countries? And if so, what can be done to prevent that both at the applicant selection criteria level but also when imagining structures to help newcomers build and grow their Tech dreams in Taiwan.

In mid-November I attended a workshop for APAC women-led start-ups, I provided mentorship and talked about my experience starting a business in Taiwan. I was given Carte Blanche, the organization did not care who had a Gold Card and who did not, who was a VVIP and who was not, the only thing that mattered was: are you running a business? What are your needs? and how can we help each other?

I was head over heels when one of the female business owners from Malaysia requested I answer her question. This was part of the program, participants give a final 3min pitch and ask one question to a mentor of their choice.

To point at me the participant simply said: I want to ask the mentor who has the same name as me, i.e. Hasnaa. This never happened to me throughout my entire studies and career in Europe and Canada.

The real gold

A decade ago, I applied for the EPEC program in Singapore. I had just finished my PhD and was certainly not making 160K NTD a month. I also did not have my Canadian passport, I applied using my German PhD degree in Life Sciences, within 3 weeks my work permit was pre-approved. I moved there a few weeks after and had a blast living and working there. I left Singapore because I was lured by the Canadian citizenship, and while I am grateful for my highly privileged passport, I also ran back to Asia as soon as I could, this time to the beautiful island of Taiwan. 

I know for fact there are many talented people who would love to stay in Asia, making the program accessible to females and minorities by adapting the selection criteria is one way of doing it. This will not only widen the pool of talent to pick from, but also attract people that are interested in committing long-term to Taiwan. It is my personal conviction that emerging democratic powers like Taiwan’s great opportunity lies in redirecting the innovation channels to be more global south centric. This will most certainly make Taiwan a leader in diverse inclusive innovation.

(The op-ed was originally published on Hasnaa's medium)


About the author:

Hasnaa Fatehi is a MedTech regulations specialist and an emerging artist (performance/visual). She thinks a lot about rules and their origins, allowing her art practice to influence her regulatory work and her regulatory work to inform her art practice. 
 
Born and raised in Morocco, Hasnaa's secret mission is to rewrite your/our imagination of Muslim women. When not researching the post-colonial muslim identify, Hasnaa reads and thinks about the many ways we can make the MedTech field more just. 


Have you read?

♦ Pandemic in a Willingly Prepared Society
♦ Taiwan needs to build a brand image beyond COVID-19
♦ Taipei Professional Orchestra: Big Band Jazz Made Possible by COVID-19

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