Private foundations on the net

Foreign philanthropy has flourished in Indonesia

Philanthropy through private foundations to strengthen civil society has long flourished fairly efficiently, effectively and usually quietly in Indonesia, even as local Indonesian philanthropies still remain marginal in comparison.

Worldwide philanthropic effort of this sort is vast and well-documented (www.google.com/Top/Society/Philanthropy, http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Issues_and_Causes/Philanthropy, and http://dmoz.org/Society/Philanthropy) but study of Indonesian philanthropy lags (www.synergos.org/globalphilanthropy/02/indonesiacsrodirectory.pdf ).

A sobering recent book, Social Science and Power in Indonesia (edited by Vedi Hadiz and Daniel Dhakidae) cogently analyses the historical constraints on foreign and local donors in developing just the social science sector (www.equinoxpublishing.com/social/default.htm). As a partial remedy, two Yahoo! academic lists, LISI (Lingkar Ilmuwan Sosial Indonesia, http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/LISI) and LIKEPP (Lingkar Indonesia untuk Kajian Ekonomi Pertanian dan Pedesaan, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LIKEPP) include very extensive self-help resources in their Files and Links areas. Exceptional organisation and careful thought are evident there.

A spell-binding recent book principally authored by Goenawan Mohamad (aided by other Indonesians), Celebrating Indonesia: Fifty Years with the Ford Foundation 1953-2003 (full-text free at www.fordfound.org/elibrary/ documents/5002/toc.cfm), stresses in a nicely personified way selective achievements in many fields through prolonged effort under difficult circumstances. Indeed, Ford, probably the largest private foreign foundation working in Indonesia, maintains a current vast searchable site and e-library of its work (www.fordfound.org/ideas). Just tap ‘Search Ford Foundation’ in the left panel, type ‘indonesia,’ and the relevant results page appears.

One reason for such manoeuvre room may be the substantial multi-national character of private foreign philanthropies in Indonesia. Even if Indonesia’s government developed an interest in controlling them, as it once tried (ultimately unsuccessfully) to do with local organisations classified as foundations (yayasan), there are just too many foreign donors now, often implicitly carrying difficult to ignore national flags, interests, and priorities.

Such an effort would also be very hard to separate from the sometimes intertwined extensive philanthropic work of bilateral official development assistance (ODA) organisations such as AusAID (www.ausaid.gov.au/country/ country.cfm?CountryId=30), USAID (www.usaid.gov/ locations/asia_near_east/countries/indonesia ), JICA (www.jica.go.jp/english, type ‘indonesia’ in its search box), CIDA (www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/webcountry.nsf/ VLUDocEn/Indonesia-Overview), DFID (www.dfid.gov.uk/countries/asia/indonesia.asp) and comparable agencies in many other states, not to mention innumerable multilateral organisations.

Which countries have the largest private foundation programs in Indonesia? There is no public or private master list. What follows is an illustrative tour of a few better known programs on the net.

The Asia Foundation, which has been programming in Indonesia since 1955, just two years less than Ford, maintains a special set of pages focused on its recent and current priorities (www.asiafoundation.org/Locations/indonesia.html). Oxfam International’s Dutch affiliate NOVIB (www.novib.nl/en) has long worked in Indonesia. Type ‘indonesia’ in its ‘free text’ search box (www.novib.nl/ en/content/?type=search) to find stories on recent projects. Wellcome Trust, the large UK medical research funder, has ongoing projects in Indonesia (www.wellcome.ac.uk). Toyota Foundation (www.toyotafound.or.jp/etop.htm) allows you to search its grants database.

German foundations, despite longstanding important work, get the least publicity. Most of their websites are in German, but often with English and Indonesian alternative sites or pages. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung publishes online in both languages (www.fes.or.id/eng/index_eng.html and www.fes.or.id/ index.html). Use the search box on the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung site or go to its Southeast Asia page (www.fnst.org/webcom/show_article.php/_c-749/_lkm-1057/i.html). Heinrich Boll Stiftung (www.boell.de/en/nav/275.html) runs a trilingual German-English-Spanish site with downloadable reports. Hanns Seidel Stiftung maintains a special English site on Indonesia (www.hss.de/homepage-e.shtml). Use Google text and webpage language translation tools (www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en) if you get lost.

In a unique bottom-up effort, Indonesians themselves monitor all these sources of grant opportunities. The highly active beasiswa (scholarship) list on Yahoo! currently has 28,000 members (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/beasiswa). For finding work after studies are completed, the vacancy list, with over 26,000 members, appears to be the largest parallel Indonesian operation (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vacancy). There are over one thousand job lists on Yahoo! with lowongan (vacancy) in their names.

Yahoo! Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com) is the principal hangout for Indonesian list makers and list readers on the net. Over 5700 lists on almost every subject appear just under the country category Indonesia (http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/ dir/Regional/Countries), a total surpassed only by India (16,000) and the Philippines (7000). There is even a list on Indonesian philanthropy (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/filantropi_indonesia).