Washington SyCip: Fighting the good fight

By Felipe Salvosa II

AT 90 years old, Washington Z. SyCip, legendary founder of the monolithic audit firm SGV & Co. and one of the pioneers of the Asian Institute of Management, is still up and about.

Mr. SyCip is wearing a new hat as the Philippine government’s private sector adviser for the 45^th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Development Bank, which opens this week in Manila.

Despite his age (Mr. SyCip has met all Philippine presidents except Emilio Aguinaldo), the accountant and accounting professor who served as a cryptographer in Calcutta during World War 2 has not fallen into the trap of cynicism. Mr. SyCip still believes Asia is the future and the Philippines has bright prospects ahead.

“It’s not the age. It’s how you feel,” Mr. SyCip told BusinessWorld in a Saturday morning interview at the SGV headquarters in Makati.

Photo from Wikipedia

It now feels better to promote the Philippines as an investment destination, said Mr. Sycip, who was instrumental to bringing in such big-ticket investors as Texas Instruments in the past.

“Now, we have an honest president. There’s much more interest on the part of many foreigners wanting to invest in Asia … we were so kept away because we had the highest corruption rate in Asia,” he said.

It shouldn’t be so hard to convince foreign investors to take a look at the Philippines, given the potential of its greatest resource – the people, he said. Filipinos can excel, given the right education and enough opportunities, said Mr. SyCip, citing the meritocracy he had installed at the country’s top professional services firm.

In this regard, Mr. SyCip is also fighting the ADB’s fight – the reduction of crushing poverty in Asia, which is home to 1.7 billion people living on less than $2 a day.

He’s doing it through education, which he believes is the way out of poverty.

Unlike other business figures, however, Mr. SyCip does not want to give out doles. Nowadays, what’s keeping the SGV Group founder busy is his involvement in nonprofits such as Synergeia, the foundation led by former Finance undersecretary Milwida M. Guevara that has developed a way to make the devolution of basic education to local governments effective. Mr. SyCip has given P10 million to help the group improve the quality of education by bringing together local government executives, school boards, teachers, parents, and their communities.

He’s also given P10 million to the microfinance outfit of Jaime Aristotle B. Alip, for a fund to provide educational loans to parents who can only afford to send at most two kids to school. So far, the repayment rate is high and there are no defaults.

In the Philippines, about one in four children do not finish elementary and become “illiterate,” he noted, adding that the parents of these kids are likely illiterate themselves. The dropout problem is not only a provincial phenomenon. Even in Taguig, a rich city in Metro Manila, kids drop out because of hunger, he said.

“It’s not about giving away scholarships. It’s having a system to motivate children to go to school,” Mr. SyCip said.

Today, Synergeia’s “education governance” scheme has significantly improved reading scores in places like Negros Occidental, Bulacan, Nueva Vizcaya, Ajuy in Iloilo, and Naga City.

Mr. SyCip is all praises for the Education secretary, Bro. Armin Luistro. As far as education is concerned, the Aquino administration is on the right track, he said, noting the Department of Education’s recent declaration of an end to the textbook shortage.

For higher education, the government should make sure the children of the rich pay their way while studying in state universities such as the University of the Philippines (UP), he said. Private schools should be required to give scholarships to a certain proportion of the school population to make college education more accessible to the poor.

Years back, Mr. SyCip -- who got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Catholic University of Santo Tomas and pursued doctoral studies at Columbia University – was shocked to find out that 10 SyCips had benefited from cheap but quality UP education, and promptly made a donation to the Diliman university to “reimburse” the government.

Mr. SyCip himself enjoyed subsidized education, being the product of Manila’s Burgos Elementary School and Mapa High School. He laments the fact that once upon a time, people like his father, the lawyer and banker Albino Z. SyCip, could send their children to public schools without handicapping them.

This week in Manila, leaders of Asia should work to give the people a “decent life,” wherein “basic education is key,” he said.

Mr. SyCip is famous for always wondering aloud how the combination of democracy and Christianity has not worked so well in the Philippines. His refrain is still the same: “Until you solve poverty, democracy is meaningless.” 

BusinessWorld, April 30, 2012