Sapto Handoyo: Many Children in Elementary Education Age Not Schooled

Rakyat Merdeka. SAMPOERNA Foundation in cooperation with Pusat Penelitian Kebijakan dan Inovasi Pendidikan invites private parties and the government to develop a program for educating the community in remote areas.

Various efforts will be taken by the government to give access to those who up to now have no access to education, apart from developing new school units or new class rooms, there are several alternative elementary education programs.

The alternative education includes Equalization programs package A, B, SMP Terbuka, SD Kecil, one roof SD-SMP, SD Pamong, and other forms of special education service which are sponsored by private parties such as jungle school, school for the poor, homeless children.

Nonetheless, there are still a number of community groups that are not touched by these forms of education service.

Sapto Handoyo as Communication Director Sampoerna Foundation encourages the government to not only focus on physical development. "For friends in the government, we must work together to do something which is more than just physical development,” says Sapto Handoyo, in a discussion with the theme Qualified Education Service in remote areas, which is organized by the Sampoerna Foundation Teacher Institute, at the Sampoerna Strategic Square, Jakarta.

According to Sapto, physical development is easy, but it is a lot harder to develop the capacity of the human and management system to progress.

"This is the most important thing," says Sapto enthusiastically. According to Sapto, by developing human resource and capacity of the management system, when the country needs good human resources, they are available.

"Because until now, we conduct more physical development so that when we need good humans, they are not available," he follows.

Such is the case with private parties. Sapto suggests that private sectors make social programs with long term effects that is really needed by the community.

"We must start developing programs that is actually needed by the community. For example a study to find out what is needed by the community and what the community already has,” he explains further.

Sampoerna Foundation itself has awarded scholarships to children everywhere in Indonesia every year. .

And Sampoerna Foundation has succeeded in making programs of education quality improvement in several rural areas, such as school and teacher development.

In the discussion, it is concluded that there should be no more criticizing between government and private parties, but both should find a way to complement each other to increase education service quality for Indonesian children by considering previous experience.

In general, the discussion aims to give a description on the contribution that can be given by the private sector in resolving the problem of elementary education service for children in the age of 7-15 years in remote areas.