Istana Negara, 4-12-2005

Remarks at the International Conference "The Legal Framework for Financial Basic Education as a Fundamental Human Right"

 

TRANSCRIPT
REMARKS BY
THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA
AT THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
“THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR FINANCING BASIC EDUCATION AS A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT”
ISTANA NEGARA, 4 DESEMBER 2005


Bismillahirrahmannirrahim,

Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh,

Doctor Bambang Sudibyo, Minister for Education,
Excellencies Ministers and Members of the Indonesian Parliament,
Senior Officers of the United Nations and other International Organizations,
Educators,
Distinguished Participants,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am pleased to welcome all of you all to Istana Negara, or the State Palace. I am so sorry that you have to work on Sunday, but you might have heard that in my administration, Sunday often is also a working day, except that we don’t get overtime pay.

By the way, I wish also to take this opportunity to thank UNESCO for having proclaimed our “Wayang” and “Keris” as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Its about time. You make us proud. So on behalf of my people, thank you.

I know that you have been here in Jakarta for a few days, and I have been reported that you have had a productive conference. And also reported by Minister of Education. Due to other official duty, I missed the opportunity to meet all of you at the opening of your Conference. But I am glad to see you this morning, because your topic of interest is of vital interest to our nation, and indeed, to the fate of humanity.

Take a good look at the ills of our world, war, crime, terrorism, hatred, ignorance, bigotry, corruption, conflict, discrimination, poverty--and you will see that there is ample room for education, and for educators, to make a difference. Your conference reaffirms the notion that education is a global challenge. I am convinced that the future of global prosperity, security and stability in the next 2 decades will be determined by how much we are willing to allocate resources to advance education for all.

The international community has set a target for this in the Millennium Development Goals. Our common aim is to achieve, by 2015, a condition whereby children everywhere, boys and girls, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

The community of nations are also committed to eliminate, by 2015, gender disparity in all primary and secondary schooling. Such is the state of our world that to ensure that children everywhere can complete grade 6—something so simple--is regarded as a great project for the community of nations. But that is the sad reality of our world. As we are speaking, 100 million children around the world are still not enrolled in primary school -- 55 per cent of them are girls.

The World Bank estimates that 900 million adults in developing countries are illiterate, two thirds of them women. And as a result of improper basic education, around 771 million people aged 15 and above live without basic literacy skills. 132 million of them are men and women between aged 15 and 24, a critical period in human productivity.

The difference in educational attainment, the difference in access to education, manifests itself in so many ways. It affects economic development, social growth, community building, democratic development, and even public security.

Talking about education, of course, is the easy part. The hard part is how to develop the right education policy that meets the needs of our citizens, and the requirements of today’s world. The problems of education are plenty, but the majority of them can basically be clustered into 3 categories, lack of will, lack of method, and lack of resources.

Countries who can deliver all 3, muster the political will to prioritize education, able to employ effective educational methods, and able to allocate financial and intellectual resources to education will be better placed to ensure higher educational standards for her citizens. Countries who deliver only 2 out of the 3, or worse, 1 out of 3, will not do as well.

When I took on this job as President of Indonesia, I knew that there are several ingredients that would be needed to fulfill the grand design to transform Indonesia. One would be good governance, which mean clean and competent governance. Another would be a priority in the health sector, which is a widely known to be a necessary part of any development strategy. And I also knew it in my heart that one critical ingredient to change Indonesia would be education. Pure and simple.

I keep say it to my fellow Indonesia that our ideology, quote and quote in the 20th century, is education, technology and good government. We are working very hard to improve those three quality, again, education, technology and government.

Let me remind you that the story of modern Indonesia began at the beginning of the 20th century, when a handful—yes, a handful—of our forefathers gained access to modern education, became exposed to powerful concepts such as nationalism, nation-state, constitutional Republic, rule of law; discovered a new scientific terminology called “Indonesia”, and sparked a movement that led to a grand revolution that created a country called Republic of Indonesia. What a great history.

And I always thought, if a handful of intellectual can create great nation, what could be achieved by millions—not a handful, but millions—of educated Indonesians from all walks of life? That will be great.

The truth is, in a world where the progress nations are becoming increasingly determined by the quality of their human capital, education has become the single most powerful tool to change the life of individuals and the fate of nations. Indeed, I think that one of the most powerful ideas that was produced in the 20th century was the fundamental right of every citizen, and every child, to education.

This idea was also enshrined in the Indonesian Constitution of 1945, which guarantees the right of each citizen to education. Over the following decades since the Constitution of 1945 came into being, we in Indonesia have made significant progress in promoting education and especially in fighting illiteracy, so that today adult literacy rate is about 88%.

In recent years, the People’s Consultative Assembly have established a target of 20% of the Government budget to be allocated to the education sector. This is further complemented by the Act on the National Education System, which secured underlined a commitment to implement the provision of basic education, free of cost, for all Indonesian citizens. Indeed, I am proud to say that as a national policy, we have made it a compulsory for every child to receive 9 year-basic education.

We are doing our best to develop our education system and improve our quality of education. We will continue to invest in our people through better education. But the problem of education is the same with most other countries, the problem of finding resources.

The 20% target for our budgetary allocation for education is presently not possible, because unfortunately we are also faced with strong budgetary pressures. The phenomenal rise of crude oil price this year presents us with a grave budgetary problem due to its impact on our oil subsidies, which we could no longer afford. In the mean time, we also needed resources to fight poverty and provide better health services.

Thus, realistically, this year we can only allocate around 9.6% of our national budget for education, and this will be raised to around 12 % for next year. But my Government is determined to speed up the process so that we will reach the 20% target sooner rather than later.

Indeed, with the significant reduction of the fuel subsidy, we have been able to shift more funds to provide better and more affordable education for all children. We have managed to disburse more than 5 trillion Rupiah, equal to USD $ 500 million, for basic education alone within this year. It is come from our compensation for the increase of the gasoline. Not a bad start. We hope to unleash more funds in the future.

In all this, improving the quality of education is critical.

You know, in the past year, I have made a number of visits to the local schools in many provinces throughout Indonesia, including in Aceh where after the tsunami, schools are being rebuilt. In those visits, I managed to meet with students from poor family who are just glad to be in a classroom instead of working.
I talked to dedicated teachers who would walk miles to teach and live on very small salary. I saw classrooms who very inadequate learning facilities, including one with a fallen roof and a fallen wall, which broke my heart. I learned about the problems relating to school books and uniforms. And I found that the most common thing that I saw in all the schools I visited was the genuine enthusiasm of children to learn, and to grow. The mind of a child is indeed a wondrous gift. We cannot let these children down.

This is why my Government is committed to improving the quality of teachers, including their teaching methods, and, yes, it also means improving the teachers’ salary. It also means improving the physical infrastructure of our schools, and finding better ways for the children to obtain school books with cheaper costs.

In the past year, my Government has rehabilitated over 55,000 classrooms in over 18,000 primary schools. We have also built around 9,726 new classrooms for 291,780 students. But numbers are meaningless if it is not followed by an improved teaching quality and curriculum. And we are working hard to overcome this by introducing better legislations, intensive trainings for teachers, and improved systematic curriculum.

We will also try our best to reach key educational targets. For example,
• We will ensure that at least 95 % of children of basic education age (7 to 15 years), especially female and poor children, will get basic education services of adequate standard, either through formal or non formal education by the year 2008, 2009.

• We will work on extensive improvements in all aspects of quality basic education, particularly in relation to the teaching staff, facilities, infrastructures, curriculums etc;

• We will reduce by 50 % the illiterate population aged 15 years and over in 5 years time.

• We will significantly raise our education budget so that we can allocate more than US$ 10 billion to provide for free basic education.

The sum of all this, I hope, is a more educated population, a more competitive Indonesia, and even a more productive democracy. It is also through education that I hope to stimulate a ”culture of excellence” for Indonesia, which I hope would ignite the whole nation and transform Indonesia.

With all this, I hope that your conference will be a valuable occasion to exchange views and best practices for realizing the basic right for basic education into reality. It has become obvious now that no matter where you come from, or how much natural resources you have, or the size of your population, in the end it is the human capital, strength of your character and power of your brain that will determine whether you are the winner or looser in the era of globalization.

And I hope through this conference you will figure out how to better expand and improve our pool of human capital, and help our children everywhere reach their dreams and realize their full potentials. No task, I assure you, is more rewarding than that.

And with that note, Excellencies Ladies and Gentelmen, I wish to end my remarks. Have a safe journey back home. I thank you.

Wassalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.

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Bureau for Press and Media Affairs
The Presidential Household