In September 2022, the Asia Foundation and the Alliance for eTrade Development (eTrade Alliance) held a policy dialogue on MSME ecommerce development with dozens of stakeholders in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region, especially to discuss ways to create the envisioned ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) and thereby promote ASEAN digital economies’ interoperability and regional digital trade.


Negotiations for the ASEAN DEFA were launched in September 2023, when the ASEAN DEFA study was endorsed at the ASEAN Economic Ministers meeting in Indonesia. The study highlighted nine essential components for DEFA negotiations, such as digital trade, crossborder ecommerce, cybersecurity, digital ID, digital payments, cross-border data flows, and further emerging topics like AI.



On 18 June 2024, the Alliance and Asia Foundation hosted a workshop with ASEAN Embassy representatives on the optimal designs of the Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) that is under negotiation to create the first South-South digital economy agreement. Alliance representatives from UPS, DHL, Mastercard, Visa and Google engaged with embassy representatives to discuss the importance of open and competitive payments markets and pro-trade payments standards and policies, paperless trade practices, adoption of AI standards to enable MSME ecommerce, and continued need for capacity-building for MSMEs to adopt ecommerce. Representatives from the ASEAN embassies offered their views on the importance of engaging several ASEAN region government agencies and local and global private sector in dialogues to shape the DEFA, and endorsed further similar dialogues in Washington.