RI needs Rp 330b to help school children

By Joko Sarwono

BOGOR, West Java (JP): Indonesia needs a staggering Rp 330 billion ($29 million) to prevent around eight million children from dropping out of school, a senior official of the National Development Planning Board has said.

Hidayat Syarief, the board's deputy for human resources, told The Jakarta Post that with the economic crisis biting deeper, millions of parents could barely afford to send their children to primary or junior high schools.

"Around eight million children could potentially be forced to leave school," he said.

The government, he said, has already allocated Rp 83 billion from this year's state budget to provide limited scholarships.

He said additional scholarships were coming through the National Foster Parents Movement and the Supersemar charity foundation.

But these were not enough, he added.

"We will most likely have to turn to borrowing (from overseas)," said Hidayat, who is professor of public health at Bogor Agriculture Institute.

"We're talking about our children's future," he added.

Hidayat said the government had been confident that it was well on its way to providing a nine-year compulsory education program for all children between the ages of six and 15 years by the end of the Seventh Five Year Development Plan in 1999.

"But with the crisis, we have had to temper our optimism. I think we now have to aim for the end of the Eighth Five Year Development Plan (in 2004), assuming that we can get out of the crisis that quickly," he said.

The government has been developing various social safety net programs to cushion the impact of the economic crisis on the nation's poor and the scholarship program is part of those efforts.

Hidayat, who graduated from North Carolina State University with a doctoral degree in 1983, underscored the need for the nation to pay greater attention to the welfare of teachers because it is closely related to the quality of teaching.

"Teachers are the key to the success of our education program. Yet they are poorly paid and their salaries are still subject to various illegal cuts (by bureaucrats)," he said.

"This has forced many teachers to look for side incomes and often this comes at the expense of their commitment to their profession," he said.

"I think we need a strong moral commitment to resolve this problem," he added.