Sri Mulyani Prepares Free Credit and Cellphone Assistance to Support Education
JAKARTA - The government is preparing educational assistance. This assistance will be provided cell phone credit to help students from poor families who have had difficulties to do the online learning activities.
Minister of Finance, Sri Mulyani, said that the challenges in the education sector are currently enormous. COVID-19 pandemic requires people to limit social activities. Including limiting face-to-face learning for students to university students.
However, this online learning system cannot be accessed or implemented by all students. Some of them find it hard to buy cell phone credit to access online classes. Because of this, the government was preparing education donations.
"Therefore, we are resolving the problem together with the relevant ministries," she said during the "Gotong Royong #JagaUMKMIndonesia: Government Stimulus to Strengthen MSMEs", Tuesday, August 11.
Sri explained that education assistance will continue to be prioritized together with health facilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for poor families.
On the other hand, the main obstacle for the government to launch the program was the messy data problem. For this reason, the government is currently tidying up their data. So it will right on target.
"All policies will be easier to execute if we have complete data. So far we have seen that our data is still fragmented. It sometimes presents a big challenge to the government to be able to provide assistance quickly," she explained.
Previously, Minister of Education and Culture, Nadiem Makarim, said that he had provided flexible policies amid the pandemic. One of them is the use of school operational assistance (BOS) funds.
BOS funds are currently being sent directly to schools without going through the local government. BOS funds are quickly distributed. It can be used for various kinds of handling the effects of the corona pandemic crisis. BOS funds can also be used to pay for honorary teachers.