To accelerate welfare development in the border areas of Papua Province, the District of Bintang Mountains held an audience and planned collaboration with Universitas Gadjah Mada. Through this collaboration as the implementation of Higher Education Tridharma, we can hopefully improve the quality of human resources by expanding and enhancing the implementation of education and health services and empowering the community’s economy.
UGM Chancellor, Prof. Panut Mulyono, and the elected Regent of Bintang Mountains Regency 2020 – 2025, Spey Yan Bidana, have officially signed the cooperation document at UGM Hall on Tuesday (5/1).
Spey Yan Bidana, as the elected Regent of the Bintang Mountains Regency 2020-2025, said that Bintang Regency is a state border and considered a disadvantaged area. Thus, he hopes for support from UGM and its alumni for educational activities and acceleration of Papua’s development through Bintang Regency.
“We focus on developing human resources for people who can finish their education from S1 (bachelor) to S3 (doctorate). As our village is located on the country’s border, we can hopefully establish the already designed university. We will encourage the establishment of a university in the border area to prepare its human resources. Hopefully, UGM is willing to become the foster father for that university,” he said.
Spey Yan Bidana also stated that to achieve success, development is managed through the agribusiness center development in the border region of Papua in the Bintang Mountains Regency. For instance, composing the grand design of an agribusiness center in Bintang Mountains Regency and compiling in detail the Community-Based Agribusiness Area.
Several plans are considered potential, some of which are a livestock-based business, Arabica coffee development in some mountainous districts, and agribusiness development of vanilla in the east. Accordingly, the Government of the Bintang Regency hopes that UGM can help them prepare technical planning documents and budget preparation.
“We highly hope for UGM support in preparing the RPJM budget because the most basic problems confronted by Bintang Regency’s people are education, health, and economy which must be supported by infrastructure,” Spey Yan Bidana explained.
Similarly, UGM Chancellor Prof. Panut Mulyono conveyed that hopefully, throughout this audience and collaboration, we will be able to accelerate development in Bintang Mountains. To advance the area, the most important thing is to develop human resource capabilities
“As we heard earlier, the elected Regent has conveyed his desire to build a university on the border’s area. It is a great goal because we improve border areas to prevent them from getting worse when compared with neighboring countries,” he said.
According to the Chancellor, it is dangerous if the neighboring countries provide much better facilities than our border areas. This is because citizens in the border areas might enjoy neighboring countries’ facilities instead of ours. Among them are various television and radio broadcasts, especially when roads in neighboring countries are much better than our border areas. It will cause a bad impact.
The Chancellor said this development is important to make border areas in Indonesia more advanced than other neighboring countries. Even though this is challenging, it is necessary to do because Indonesia’s border areas are large.
UGM welcomes collaboration on improving human resources in Bintang Regency by facilitating studies at UGM, both for undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral degrees. UGM opens opportunities for the best students of the Bintang Mountains Regency to study at UGM.
“Meanwhile, regarding the tactical process of development, such as how UGM helps regional planning and financial planning and so on, UGM has experts who can assist with that. At UGM itself, a Papua Task Force managed by Bambang Purwoko serves to help Papua. I guess there are multiple things we can do to care, how to develop the border areas, because it is very important for the welfare and existence of Indonesia,” he said.
Source: https://ugm.ac.id/id/berita/20586-ugm-dan-kabupaten-bintang-kerjasama-pembangunan-daerah-perbatasan
