From 6 to 16 March I visited Indonesia. Travelling to my home country is always very exciting, but this time it was really special because it was the first time I went there for Aflatoun International. After flying 14 hours from Amsterdam to Jakarta, I began my 10 days visit to meet and attend some events in Jakarta, Bandung, Lampung and Surabaya.
Meetings with big International NGO’s like Childfund International, World Vision, PLAN International, Save the Children and UN agencies such as UNICEF were very exciting. It was agreed during these meetings that Social Financial Education is very important and needs to be integrated in their ongoing programmes or their new upcoming programmes. Childfund International just launched their new Lifeskills and Aflatoun programme in two districts in Lampung and will scale up in the second year. World Vision showed interest in integrating the Aflatoun and Aflateen curriculum in their ongoing regular programme in all of their projects. PLAN International will discuss the possibility to use Aflatoun’s financial education programme in their BLOOM (Better Life Options and Opportunities Models) project. Save the Children is also thinking about integrating Aflatoun’s financial education curriculum into their regular education programme, especially for 3 – 15 year old children. And UNICEF will share our Aflatot curriculum with their module development team for their new ongoing project in one district in Eastern Indonesia and will discuss the integration of the Social Financial Education curriculum into their new module.
I also paid a courtesy visit to the Indonesia Early Childhood Education (ECE) Director Ministry of Education (MoE) Ms. Ella Yulaelawati and Head of ECE and Community Education Training Center Mr. Muhammad Hasbi. The Indonesian government i.e. ECE Training Center agreed to pilot the Aflatot curriculum in West Java and Jakarta this year and upon the success of the pilot project, the ECE Directorate MoE will scale up to national level with their own state budget by 2018.
Besides Jarkarta I visited some remote places where our partners implement our programme in primary schools. I visited some primary schools in Lampung, Sumatera island and also in the Pringsewu district where the Aflatoun programme has been implemented since 2014.
