On Competencies, Outcomes and Nation-Building: What Strikes Us the Most

It has been a good Day 2 of my stint here in Malang Indonesia for a rounds of knowledge sharing on Nursing Informatics and its application to Nursing Education in one of the best Universities in Indonesia when the hosts decided to tour me around one of the interesting sights in their area – the slums. What made this special is not it being a slum area, but the narrative behind the transformation that took place over the last three years when eight marketing management students took on the challenge of transforming these slums into a tourist spot with their social development initiative.

With the help of a local paint company, 6000 pounds of colorful paint has transformed this seemingly gloomy and polluted village into a festival of colors. The bad habits of the people living in this area were part of the rehabilitation, which changed their undesirable social habits and improved living conditions in the area. The river which was then an area of excreta disposal has improved greatly by having people use proper excreta disposal methods. Entrance fees to village also formed part of the social mobilization fund that provides its community money for use during festivities or emergencies like hospitalization, among others.

What amazes me is the true semblance of community empowerment among the community members. Unlike most education institutions which are just bragging community involvement and companies which flaunts its corporate social responsibility, Kampung Warna-Warni Jodipan (Village of Color) became sustainable even after 3 years of its inception. To even more interesting heights, nearby areas generated similar concepts creating Kampung Tridi (3D Village) and Kampung Biru (Blue Village – being blue as the official color of Malang).

Throughout the ASEAN Region, we need more educational institutions that bring outcomes in their scope of regional influence. Board top-notchers, school rankings and mundane metrics on educational excellence are meaningless if our graduates cannot contribute to the economic and social growth and development of its localities. Perhaps it is time to reconsider how we measure excellence in the academic institutions, especially when we send off professionals to other countries to work. When we generate experts for other countries to utilize, aren’t we truly shortchanging our nation of the service we deserve? Aren’t we spending our nation’s money for the benefit of our neighboring countries? Globalization and being internationally competitive surely doesn’t mean we put our nation last in priority of the quality service we deserve as nationals.