CCPHI’s 5th Education and Business Forum: Students Learning Entrepreneurship
An Education and Business Forum (EBF) titled "Entrepreneurship Program for High School Students," sponsored by Company-Community Partnerships for Health in Indonesia (CCPHI) with GE Indonesia, took place on January 23, 2013. Hosted by GE and moderated by Mohammad Ihsan of the Indonesian Teachers Association (IGI), this fifth EBF drew 47 participants, representing 15 companies, 7 NGOs, and 2 educational institutions.
The entrepreneurship program is supported by a partnership between GE and Prestasi Junior Indonesia (PJI, at www.prestasijunior.org ), is an affiliate of Junior Achievement Worldwide, an organization for entrepreneurial, business and economic education based in Boston, USA. PJI focuses on educating elementary and high school students in Indonesia to improve their creativity and business and workforce-readiness skills.
Arief Nur Budiman, GE's volunteer champion, and Robert Gardiner, Co-Founder and Executive Director at PJI, described their partnership, titled "Students' Entrepreneurship Program," as designed to educate senior high school students on entrepreneurship, financial literacy, work readiness, and related subjects. This ongoing program started in 2007 in three provinces in Indonesia: Jakarta, West Java, and Yogyakarta.
The partnership focuses on building students' leadership, organizational, and entrepreneurial skills through interactive learning activities. Program subjects and activities include (1) economics for life, an introduction to entrepreneurial education through a series of activities-based lessons such as developing a business plan and personal financial management; (2) job shadowing that takes students into GE's office and pairs them with GE volunteers to experience a day of work within a business environment; (3) training for business leadership; and (4) basic economics education that allows students to organize and operate an actual business initiative.
GE provides resources that include funding and GE volunteers to teach students leadership and serve as mentors for job shadowing. PJI trains GE volunteers and helps identify schools to participate in the program. By the end of 2012, PJI had trained more than 300 GE volunteers who had taught and mentored more than 12,000 students from 35 public schools in the three provinces.
GE (www.ge.com) is a multinational company in the business power & water, energy management, oil and gas, aviation, rail transportation, healthcare, and lighting. GE has been present in Indonesia since 1940 and now has more than 700 employees. Its citizenship programs focus on environment, economy, and social development.