Virus travel ban threatens Indonesia study program

A long-running program for students to study in Indonesia has warned it may go under because of COVID-19 travel bans.

ACICIS students in Yogyakarta at the Kebon Agung Tourism Village where they learned how to make their own batik.

A long-running and highly successful program for Australian students to study in Indonesia has warned it may go under because of COVID-19 travel bans.

After being forced to evacuate its students back to Australia from Indonesia in March, the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesia Studies has seen much of this year’s revenue disappear.

The organisation’s director, Liam Prince, warned that if Indonesia remained off-limits to Australian university students next summer then ACICIS might be forced to close by October, ending its 25-year history of sending Australian university students to Indonesia.

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The university summer break is a peak period for student exchanges to Indonesia. In the past summer ACICIS sent 350 students to Indonesia, a large proportion of the 500 it sends annually.

The group is still accepting applications for next summer, hoping that the visits will be able to go ahead.

Mr Prince said the sudden halt because of the pandemic was “particularly painful given the unprecedented numbers of Australian students we’ve seen studying in Indonesia in recent years”.

The federal government’s New Colombo Plan, which funds overseas study and internships for Australian students, gave ACICIS a huge boost when it began in 2014.

Since then ACICIS has received $12m from the NCP to support 2500 students from the consortium’s 23 Australian university members to support their study programs in Indonesia.

Mr Prince said ACICIS had started an appeal to raise $150,000 from its thousands of alumni to keep the organisation’s core infrastructure in place until normal operations can resume.

“It’s our hope that those of our alumni for whom study in Indonesia was a formative experience might have a desire to ‘pay this forward’ and contribute to ensuring ACICIS is around after the pandemic to deliver similar formative experiences to the next generation of Indonesia-curious Australian students,” he said.

He said the organisation was also in discussions with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, and its member universities seeking a financial lifeline.

“We are pulling on all of the limited levers we have at our disposal,” Mr Prince said.

He said when the COVID crisis ended all the organisation’s stakeholders would want Indonesian study programs to continue so there was good reason to keep ACICIS afloat now.

ACICIS has seen huge growth since the start of the New Colombo Plan in 2014 and last year sent 100 students to Indonesia for a semester or more, many of them studying courses taught in the Indonesian language along side local students.

About another 200 went on six week visits, with two weeks of intensive language study followed by a four-week work placement. Another 200 went for two or three-week study visits.

Donors can give at www.acicis.edu.au/acicis-fundraising-appeal/