Education
After being in Taiwan for more than 5 years, I’ve had the chance to see how things are done and solved in different ways. This has given me the opportunity to appreciate and compare Honduras and Taiwan in many aspects.
As one of the countries with the slowest development in Latin America, Honduras has a lot to learn from Taiwan in terms of safety, politics, economy, ecology protection, urbanism and waste recycling, just to mention few.
To help improve the situation in Honduras, I would definitely like to implement in my country some of the systems used in Taiwan. But if I have to decide on one system that we desperately need to imitate from Taiwan, is without doubt, education. Why? First of all, I believe that education represents one of the most important factors in the development of a country and ensures the success of a nation.
Swaziland is a developing country with many public health problems such as high rates of maternal and infant mortality, among others. These can be solved my adopting some concepts from Taiwan’s systems especially in the education and health systems. I believe an educated nation is better able to practise good health seeking behavior and to subsequently live a healthy lifestyle. Health and education are priority investment areas for many developing countries. As a health professional, I have seen in practice, the disparities between educated and less educated people; how their judgments differ, life style, health seeking, and many more, which in-turn affect their health. Therefore, it is inevitable that health and education cannot be separated as they are positively related. Swaziland can adopt some concepts from Taiwan to try and combat some of the problems we have, since Taiwan already has an excellent health and education system.
growth rate and a stable political environment have helped to draw lots of investment, which contributes to the improvement of its infrastructure. Transport system is one of major elements of a country’s infrastructures. A good transport system will not only speed up the circulation of goods and services, but it will also raise the people’s quality of life. To Vietnam’s national planners, building a developed transport system which works effectively for a long term is critically important.
sustainability of the system. Wide and modern highways enable the transit of vehicles at higher speeds. The number of lanes varies along the highway and it is usually between 2 and 5 lanes for each direction. Additionally, the quality of the road is excellent. Potholes and other road faults are practically inexistent. In my country this is a big issue since drivers have to dodge big potholes sometimes covered completely by water. The highway design is heavily based on the Interstate Highway System of the United States. Most of the road signs contain an English translation and locations are often written with its respective Pinyin, which makes it easier for foreign drivers. Moreover, drivers have access to advanced traveler information systems such as precise mapping technology and driver assistance. In order to control over speeding and drunk driving, speed enforcement cameras and tolls are strategically located along the highway. A big advantage of Taiwanese highways is that they are usually straight and lack of strong curves thanks to its topography.
Taiwan, a small island in the Asian continent, is amazing in so many ways. The people, the culture, the mix of different persons from everywhere around the world (and all of them, in a way or another, feeling in some point during their stay in Taiwan, that they somehow belong here and they are home), the infrastructure, the transportation system, and a long list of etc. I will ask for your permission of sharing my experience of living in Taiwan, and being more specific what would I like to implement in my own country, but first I will briefly talk about my country. I am from El Salvador, in Central America, a country with so many problems to be solved in many different areas. It is a small country as well (21,000 km2), and our population is of approximately 6.288.899 people. Among the problems to be solved, there’s one that takes special relevance and is the public transportation system, mainly in the capital city, San Salvador. One can say that our public transportation system is very efficient (a bus passes in front of a bus station every 20 seconds), but not effective for the whole traffic flow. There exist oversupply of buses. Just as simple as that. The bus transportation system is handled by private companies, not by the government. Another problem in San Salvador is the preponderance of individual motorized transportation (automobiles, pickup’s, motorcycles, Sub’s, etc.), added to the known oversupply of public transformation buses; those factors causes huge traffic jams over the most transited highways and roads of the capital city. So the question comes: what solution could be proposed in other to minimize this situation? It is very hard to don’t look at Taiwan’s public transportation system and think of implementing something similar in my country, specifically in the capital city. In 2011, over 863.4 million passengers used the rail systems in Taiwan, averaging 2.36 million passengers per day. Pretty impressive number, considering that San Salvador’s metropolitan area population is approximately of 2 million people. It is easy to imagine how many benefits it would bring to San Salvador’s traffic related problems, and of course, to the economy of the whole country as well. An advantage of El Salvador is that it already has a railway infrastructure (approximately 500 km of railroads), which means that some of them can be utilized to mobilize people to their destinies.
In the College of Civil Engineer that I part of that organization, I want to present them many ideas, to implement in our construction, such as the different types of product that we can use, their security system in constructions, how we can improve their designs in many things such as structure, management, economy, etc. My methods that I can use are: conferences like I’m doing in my university meeting, that we can discuss how to improve and implement our construction methods, at the same time give the opportunities to provider to promote new products, other point that I can use in my civil engineering college the opportunity to improve the skills and knowledge of own partners. Also these things I want to apply in own universities.
and politics.
Taiwan is an Island in the South - East Asia and is amongst the developed countries in the world. The country has experienced fast economic growth over the last ten years and has become a superpower in the Asian countries. Moreover, the country has bilateral relationships with Swaziland and this has extended to the diplomatic ties which have realized the strengthening of political, economic, and social relations. Swaziland is a developing country, located in the Southern part of Africa completely surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique.