The rural part has always been the toughest in the development sector, whether it is providing access to healthcare, inclusive education, poverty alleviation, or women empowerment. Add to that the cost of regular or manual data collection, monitoring, and evaluation. With the vast growth of technology in cities, there are rural parts where there is a need for a sustainable solution.
At SociopreneurID, our aim to bring inclusive education content to prior challenges. We believe that everyone should be equipped with sufficient quality education; hence we work with organizations to amplify our impact on bridging the gap in education, especially in the rural area. Here, we held Empathy Project at Kelurahan Sembulang — a village located 53.4 km from the district city, Batam.
The development of the population in the Kelurahan Sembulang is stagnant, this was due to the fact that it was located in the hinterland area far from the city. Most people in Sembulang are farmers with a percentage of 37.31% and laborers as the least type of occupation at 0.24%.
Furthermore, Kelurahan Sembulang is surrounded by forest with many natural resources so that it is utilize for gardening, develop agricultural cultivation, and livestock as a livelihood and source of income. Education-wise, despite a few people that had a bachelor to master degree and diploma, there were many that haven’t finished their primary education — in fact, 38.33% of the total population.
Education and its disparity was an indispensable challenge in Indonesia. While people in the big city have easy access to education, people in rural area are struggling to work 12 hours a day to be able to feed their families, let alone getting a decent education.
“when I was doing a social project (near Kelurahan Sembulang), I heard about a family who took two hours of travel by paddling, to take their child to school, every day” said Kak Rizqi (Lecturer of UIB)
People — especially in a rural area — need to cope with the challenges that lie ahead. If access to formal (or even informal) education is far from a reachable state, nonformal education could be what we found as the best fit solution. In alignment with this thinking and our focus on bringing education for all, we are keen that entrepreneurship education — in form of a nonformal education — could help people in a rural area to compete with current and future challenges.
Across three years of constant experimentation and research period, we tested many creativity games as interventions that we hope to nurture students’ PhISeS (physical, intellectual, social-emotional, and spiritual) skills to more than ten thousand children and youths across Indonesia. These creativity games were embodied in each of the given interventions that focus on children and youth development as part of SociopreneurID’s nonformal entrepreneurship education programs.
One of the interventions that I — personally — found to be the most important is Bintang Impian. It is a creativity game that manifested in AHAI (a program designed for primary school children). In Bintang Impian, children were taught to express their dream, sounds simple right? Hence, we believe that it manifests the importance of discovery learning to stimulate and reflects on children’s experiences and change perception to have goals and visions.
I stumbled upon one of the children that told me he wants to be a professor. I asked why and he answered:
“I want to be a professor because I was inspired by Prof. Dr. Ing. H. Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie. I’ve read his book. And someday I hope that I could invent future technology as a professor.” said Exson.
SociopreneurID is keen to address education for all from children to youth. Empathy Project 2018 was attended by 81 primary school students, 137 junior-secondary high students, 29 youths from various regions in Indonesia, 20 volunteers, and deployed 4 micro-libraries in 4 different areas in Kelurahan Sembulang. To see the details about the project visit www.sociopreneur.id
