Government should invest more in education: National commission

Leo Wahyudi S, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The National Commission on Education in a report has underlined the need for the country to invest more in education, noting that despite the higher allocation in the 2002 State Budget, spending in this field lagged far behind other countries.

The Commission pointed out that just 1 percent of Gross Domestic Product was spent on education, far below the 4.5 to 7 percent levels of developed countries, or the 2.5 to 7.5 percent levels in many other developing countries.

Despite the potential of many Indonesian children, evidenced by the country's successes in various scholastic Olympiads, overall Indonesian education had continued to regress.

A 1998 World Bank study showed Indonesian children did poorly in even basic literacy tests, while a recent report by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) also ranked Indonesia at the bottom of its 12-country study.

The new government under President Megawati Soekarnoputri has increased the budget allocation for the development of the education sector to Rp 11.6 trillion, or nearly a quarter of the 2002 budget's spending on development, a 19 percent increase compared to the previous budget.

But this was still deemed insufficient.

"There needs to be coordination between the Ministry of National Education and other relevant ministries on how to increase the education budget," the Commission said in its report without mentioning a specific sum.

Referring to a study jointly sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), Fasli Djalal, the Commission's deputy chairman, suggested that a rough estimate of about Rp 1.3 million should be allocated for the education of every one of the 28.4 million elementary students in the country.

Meanwhile, Rp 1.8 million per year should be allocated for the 9.4 million junior high school students, and Rp 2.6 million for every one of the 5.3 million senior high school students.

While urging the government to fork out more, the commission at the same time also called for greater public participation in education investment.

Data from 1995-1996 shows that the government supplies 94 percent of the funding for overall primary education in the country.

The commission underlined that if public funding was to increase, the government would have to reform its management of schools thereby ensuring financial transparency and accountability.

The commission also stressed that Indonesia's education system must abide by principles which guaranteed the poor the right to access education through the use of cross-subsidy schemes, among other mechanisms.

Commission chairman and former education minister Fuad Hassan, during the submission of the report to the ministry on Thursday, said elementary education must get immediate priority.

"Elementary education forms the foundation of higher education, thus it must be the core consideration in determining education policies," Fuad said.