19th Health and Business Roundtable Indonesia: “Telaga Desa: Agriculture and Environment Education Park”
Company-Community Partnerships for Health in Indonesia (CCPHI) facilitated its 19th Health and Business Roundtable Indonesia (HBRI) on October 24 in Jakarta. PT. Maligi Permata Industrial Estate (MPIE), a company that operates an industrial estate in West Java, and the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization for Tropical Biology (Biotrop), a regional tropical biology research center, gave a presentation on their partnership, titled “Telaga Desa: Agriculture and Environment Education Park in Karawang International Industrial City (KIIC), Karawang District, West Java, Indonesia.”
Sinarmas, one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia, hosted the event. Riris Sundrijo from Pacivis UI, an NGO affiliated with the University of Indonesia, moderated the meeting, which drew 66 participants representing 13 companies, 23 NGOs, 1 association, and 3 academic institutions.
Telaga Desa, the name of an ongoing program begun in 2007, refers to a lake (telaga) in a village (desa) located in the KIIC's area. MPIE operates Telaga Desa as a center of agricultural business training for communities around the industrial complex. Biotrop's purpose is to (1) manage agricultural demonstration farms and plots and (2) provide training in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and animal husbandry, as well as postharvest processing, so the communities can engage in business that will increase their income.
The program targets five villages that include approximately 12,000 households, and thus far it has distributed 64,000 catfish and goldfish seeds and 36,000 tree seedlings. The long-term goal of the program is to improve the welfare of the community, including the health of its members.
After the presentation, participants discussed the advantages and challenges of partnering with educational institutions. Four advantages came out of the discussion: that an educational institution (1) has the capacity to do the research for program planning and evaluation, (2) can mobilize students as agents of change for many development issues, (3) can include program issues in its curriculum to support the program's sustainability, and (4) is perceived as a neutral organization. On the other hand, the challenges are (1) the bureaucratic and hierarchical systems in schools and universities and (2) low awareness among educators of the importance of development issues other than education.