Bambang Basuki

Bambang Basuki is building a system to provide quality and unlimited education for the visually impaired in Indonesia. Realizing that many blind students are limited by the lack of learning materials available to them, he created the Mitra Netra Foundation to develop a resource center in Jakarta as a model and increase the capacity of other organizations across the country to function as resource center to better cater to the needs of blind students.

Bambang is working to give people with visual disabilities access to full, high quality educations. Being a teacher at a special school for the blind, Bambang realized that these institutions served a limited number of Indonesians and failed to adequately prepare visually impaired students for universities and careers, as well as productive citizenship. Taking advantage of the Indonesian government’s commitment to integrated education, he launched an institution to equip mainstream schools with the knowledge they need to teach blind and visually impaired students. Through the Mitra Netra Foundation, Bambang creates a resource center in Jakarta as a model and increase the capacity of other organizations across the country to function as resource center as well as making them access to teaching materials, new technologies, and support for teachers with blind students. These resource centers also provide direct services to visually impaired people, including peer counseling and academic support. In opening the possibility for truly inclusive education, Bambang exposes all students to peers of different abilities, building respect for people with special needs and a more inclusive society. Bambang has taken advantage of increasingly available new technologies to develop and spread tools that greatly improve the quality of education for blind people. The Mitra Netra Foundation has launched online libraries of Braille and digital audio books and produces hundreds such books a year. Bambang and his colleagues have also refined Indonesian Braille to include new symbols for math, science, and languages, and developed new software, information, and communication devices for the blind. Through resource centers and public libraries, Bambang builds the social networks needed to make these technologies widely accessible.

According to the World Health Organization, 10 percent of Indonesia’s 230 million people have disabilities. Of these, roughly three million are blind or visually impaired. Blind people face considerable obstacles with respect to gaining access to education, jobs, and other elements of full citizenship. In fact, they are often segregated and treated as burdens on society rather than productive contributors. To make the situation worse, most Indonesians are not exposed to people with visual impairments at all, and therefore are not adequately prepared to provide appropriate services for them.

The current education system for the visually impaired has many deficiencies. People with disabilities are entitled to “special education” by law, but the way this manifests itself is through segregated government-funded special schools. There are just over 1,000 special schools for the blind in all of Indonesia, not nearly enough to serve the country’s population of visually impaired. Most of the time, access is limited to only those students whose parents can afford the school fees. Further, special schools do not adequately prepare visually impaired students for university, jobs, or full participation in society instead teaching blind students tired vocational skills such as weaving.

In recent years, the Indonesian government has made a commitment to inclusive education, incorporating visually impaired students in regular schools. In practice, however, progress has been slow. There are inadequate resources for schools to effectively adopt inclusive education policies, leaving blind students with inadequate resources, unskilled teachers, and a lack of support services necessary to ensure their success. If students learn from an early age to interact with people with disabilities and respect their differences, society as a whole will become less discriminatory and more inclusive.

Bambang founded the Mitra Netra Foundation in 1991 to provide quality education for blind and visually impaired Indonesians. Through the foundation, he is building a support system for mainstream schools to better incorporate these students into the fabric of their student bodies by creating a resource center for the visually impaired. The center offers special training and assistance to teachers, providing teaching materials such as Braille and digital audio books. Further, center gives extra support directly to blind students, including computer and internet training using screen reader technology, academic support in special subjects such as math, physics, and English, and university services to help students apply for and succeed at university studies.

Bambang has also worked to provide support beyond simply the physical, as evidenced by his recent partnership with Citibank, he and his colleagues develop electronic dictionary for visually impaired students and incorporation with the International Council on Education for People with Visual Impairment gives support to help university students get loans to acquire computers and special screen reader technology. He also feels that psychological support is essential in helping blind students become independent, productive citizens, and as such, resource centers encourage the creation of support groups and peer counseling as well.

Underpinning Bambang’s efforts to promote quality education is the development and dissemination of new technologies for the blind. One of his first points of intervention with special schools is to train them in using these new technologies, some of which have been developed at Mitra Netra. For instance, the foundation has pioneered an online Braille library to store Braille books owned by a network of different organizations and publishers, many of which were produced using a Braille converter software developed by Mitra Netra. Bambang has launched a public awareness campaign, “Thousands of Books for the Blind” and gets hundreds of volunteers a year to produce new Braille and audio books. Bambang and his colleagues have also refined Indonesian Braille symbols for math, science, and language, the majority of which have been adopted by the government for special schools for the blind across Indonesia. Further, technologies have developed to the point where Bambang can spread his work on a broad scale, allowing him to pilot a project with the National Education Department Library of Jakarta to help public libraries get equipped with resources for the blind.

Bambang is poised to expand his work to much of the country and influence public policy as to ensure its sustainability and replication. In Jakarta, where Bambang is based, he has partnered with the Jakarta Office of Culture and the Department of Education to pilot an integrated educational system in thirty public junior and senior high schools. Additionally, the Mitra Netra Foundation aims to push the government to support innovative programs, mobilize resources, and build networks of support for better services to the blind.

Bambang was a bright and promising student in grade school, excelling in science and art, and aspiring to be an architect. However, in the second year of high school he began to lose his sight, and soon after his graduation, he went completely blind. The experience was incredibly traumatizing for him, and for three years, he confined himself to his house.

Eventually, Bambang met a special education teacher who was also blind, and helped him regain a sense of purpose. Inspired, he wanted to follow in his mentor’s path and become a teacher as well, but the obstacles he faced were large, as he battled constant discrimination during his admissions process to the Teacher Education High School and the Jakarta Teachers’ College. He also struggled during his university studies, as there were no books in Braille, reading services, or support for people with his disability. After years of hard work, he finally graduated with a high distinction in 1980.

When Bambang applied for an English teacher position he was again rejected. However, he brought the case to a high-ranking official at the Education Ministry and was given a second chance. After making it through, he was posted as an English teacher at a special school for the blind in Cilandak, South Jakarta. There, he launched a project to develop a supply of audio books at the school by working with women from the neighboring communities to set up a mini studio.

Bambang started the Mitra Netra Foundation with some of his colleagues, using existing local resources. When he returned from a seminar in Singapore a year after the foundation’s creation, Bambang brought a new focus on innovation in the development of information and communication technology.