'Bina Swadaya' excels in cooperation spirit

'Bina Swadaya' excels in cooperation spirit

By Johannes Simbolon

JAKARTA (JP): The office you first see once you get into Bina
Swadaya's headquarters in Central Jakarta, does not look that
interesting, except for the notice attached to the counter, which
reads, "Leader in Alternative Tourism".

Bina Swadaya tours and travels offers unconventional tour
packages: ecotourism, agro-tourism, and -- the most unique of all
-- study tourism. With the latter, tourists are taken to observe,
first-hand, the problems faced by Indonesians in grassroots-level
projects in the current developmental programs and to muse over
the solution.

Since being set up in 1987, the enterprise's achievements have
been impressive. During the peak tourist season, its tour
packages are fully booked by groups of visitors from away as far
as Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan. Some local non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) have plans to set up similar
enterprises for themselves and have asked Bina Swadaya to train
them. Some overseas companies seem to have imitated it.

"A similar travel bureau was set up by some Dutchmen, in 1993,
in Amsterdam. They named it 'Multatuli Travel'. And their motto
is 'responsible tourism'" Bambang Ismawan, the president director
of Bina Swadaya, told The Jakarta Post with smiles.

Bambang did not have the slightest idea that Bina Swadaya --
initially called Yayasan Sosial Tani, or Rural Socio Economic
Foundation, set up in 1967 by the Pancasila Farmers Association
-- would, someday, be involved in the tourism industry, when he
and some friends founded it.

"The idea of setting up the travel bureau occurred to us
because of our experiences in accompanying many people to tour
our developmental projects. When it became so tiring for us to
take around all the guests, we thought 'why not set up a special
office dealing with matter?'. That's when Bina Swadaya Travel was
born, and is now making profits," Bambang said.

The travel bureau is just one episode in the Bina Swadaya's
long success story.

Started as a small NGO, Bina Swadaya -- the name it has used
since 1984 -- is today been regarded as Indonesia's strongest and
most established NGO, one of the few Indonesian NGOs which can
solve the traditional NGO's illness, that of, "dependency on
foreign funds".

Business

According to Bambang, it has, today, a Rp 15 billion budget,
enough to renumerate its 700 full time workers, handling tens of
grassroot developmental projects throughout the country, compared
to 10 years back, when it could only pay 100 workers.

"We have self-financed our activities for 10 years. Before
that, we were 100 percent funded by the Konrad Adenauer
Stiftung," said Bambang.

Konrad Adenauer Stiftung is a German NGO, affiliated with the
Christliche Democratische Union (CDU) party. It started operating
in Indonesia in 1968.

There is, indeed, no other way of reaching the self-financing
condition except by doing business. In this respect, what Bina
Swadaya has done is very impressive. Up to date, it has a total
of 12 business, including:

*The Alternative Tourism division;

*The Trubus magazine division, which publishes the country's
most successful agricultural magazine;

*The book publication division, which runs two publishing
houses--Penebar Swadaya, producing up to 100 titles on
agriculture a year, distributed through 585 local bookstores
throughout the country; and Puspa Swara, specializing in
publishing books on community development, health and literature;

*The agribusiness development division, which makes money
through two enterprises: Mahatani, specializing in gardening, and
Prasada, agricultural tool distributor;

*The division of development consultants, which gives paid
consultations on social forestry, community water and sanitation,
as well as environmentally rural economic development. Its
customers now include governmental and international agencies;

*The capital development division, which engages in banking
business in rural areas.

So far, it has established rural credit banks in Cimanggis and
Subang (West Java), Central Lampung, and Yogyakarta.

Bina Swadaya might seek profits, but it is still different
from other businesses because its businesses concentrate on the
grassroots level of people enterprises, helping develop them
either directly or indirectly; and, most of all, they are
different in the way the profits are spent.

"Bina Swadaya is an NGO, not a profit making company. In the
latter, the profit is to be shared among shareholders. In Bina
Swadaya, there are no shareholders. The profits, if any, are
reinvested in other grassroots developmental projects," Bambang
explained.

To Bina Swadaya, however, business is not the only road
towards survival. Experiences have taught them that a good
relationship with the bureaucracy is also necessary.

"In the early eighties, we once had a plan to run a pump-
installment project in a village in the Kerawang regency of West
Java. We had gained approval from the village head, then the
district chief, but hit a snag at the regency office. The regent
said we should have provided ourselves with a sort of political
clearance beforehand," recalled Bambang.

Gradually, Bina Swadaya succeeded in winning the trust of some
governmental agencies. It has, up to date, cooperated with the
National Agency of Family Planning and the Department of
Transmigration in forming "self-reliance groups" among the family
planning acceptors and transmigrants.

For years, the "Self-reliance group" or Kelompok Swadaya
Masyarakat has been the model developed by Bina Swadaya in its
effort to develop the economy of people at the grassroots level.
In the group, a small number of people are guided in such a way
that they can help each other develop their economy. The model is
considered so successful that tens of development-oriented NGOs
and governmental officials come to study it in Bina Swadaya's
Campus of Education and Training, located on a one-hectare plot
of land in Cimanggis, Bogor, every year.

The basics of the "self-reliance group" model can now be seen
in the current poverty alleviation program, called IDT.

In fact, Bina Swadaya contributed to the program. According to
Bambang, Bina Swadaya, together with some other NGOs, were asked
by the National Developmental Planning Board to co-devise it,
before it was launched by President Soeharto in April 1994.

In what can be taken as an acknowledgement of Bina Swadaya's
contribution to the program, a group of Vietnamese officials,
including one minister, came some months later to study the
program at Bina Swadaya.

After three decades of dealing with the grassroots level
development, Bina Swadaya has achieved many things, from
expertise, relatively big money and costumers, to fame. Many NGOs
have tried to imitate the way it seeks to survive through
businesses.

This raises an important question: Will NGOs turn into
industries -- community development industries? And what's wrong
with that? Bina Swadaya will probably give a lot of answers to
this in the future.