Can you teach the mums?

JAKARTA, Indonesia. May - June 2023.

Last year, I went to Jakarta twice to teach underprivileged children (English to kids and entrepreneurship to young adults) and it was amazing to see how much passion they had to learn. I posted an article The Have Nots of Indonesia which addressed the remarkable digital start-up industry where local companies had disrupted the disrupted global brands. For example, Gojeck which started as a small company (Ojeck = motorbike) - a call centre which connected drivers to courier delivery. In 2010, there were only 20 motorbike drivers. Thirteen years later, it has launched so many brands such as GoSend, GoShop, Gofood, GoStore, that it is very much the place to go to get almost anything. Together with other apps such as Sayburbox (a web based platform for fruit and vegetables for healthy living), J&T Express (provides express logistics and delivery), HaloDoc (connects patients with doctors, labs and pharmacies), RuangGuru (online video lectures, study notes, quizzes), Bukalapak (sells consumer goods), Tiket.com (flights, hotels) ... list goes on and on ... there is really no need for booking.com, Uber, Alibaba, eBay etc.

And because of these examples, the young adults got the concepts of entrepreneurship, digital marketing and cash flow very quickly because they could relate to domestic apps as they were consumers.

So three weeks ago, on my return trip, I got, "Can you teach the mums this time? And could we specifically look at FMCG?" (FMCG = Fast Moving Consumer Goods). My initial reaction was that this is really outside my territory. I hadn't worked with FMCG companies for years! So I contacted a friend, did some adjustments to the design and gave it a shot. I discovered that the mums were more interested in selling cosmetics, cakes and doughnuts with home-to-home delivery or on kiosks. And by the way, this is all using cash and not online systems which Indonesia has become so used to. The person translating from English to Bahasa Indonesian took 5 times as long to translate because (he told me), he had to translate what I had been saying into Bahasa Indonesian and then into mum language!

Later in the week, I discovered the real reason for the request to teach the mums. As in many poverty-stricken areas, there is a lot of domestic violence in families and it seems that the mums took the brunt of it. So just as education is being used to help break the poverty circle with youths and kids, it is also being used to give mums more independence, so they could potentially move away from their current environment.

Another rewarding experience for me and look forward to my return.

PS The photo is of me and the kids after learning the words for colours :)