Indonesians in Focus: Jacqueline Michelle Sampoerna

When her father asked Jacqueline Michelle Sampoerna to return to Indonesia and help realize his dream of improving the country’s education system, her answer was a question: Why me? Michelle, as she is affectionately called, fled to Singapore during the May 1998 anti-Chinese Indonesian riots and was quite frightened of returning. She did not want to come home and stay in Indonesia as Kanis Dursin writes.

“He knew I did not want to come back and stay here. He said to me that there was something that he wanted to do for the country. So, we sat down and he explained it. I looked at him and said why me of all the people?” said the eldest of four siblings.

But that was eight years ago. Now Michelle, who was born in the United States but grew up in Singapore, is fully inspired by her father Putra Sampoerna‘s mission and has developed a passion for it.

“This task evolved into a passion that I hold very dearly in may heart,” said Michelle, chairman of the board of supervisors of the Sampoerna Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the country’s human resources.

That passion did not come overnight, though. When she came home in 1999, she did so out of respect and obligation to her father, who she said wanted to do something for the country and build a legacy for himself and for the family. For the first eight to ten months, she was just roaming around meeting with different people in a bid to understand the education system and problems confronting it.

“Nobody was giving me directions. Papa would say `yes this is what I want’ but never held our hands to say `this is how you do it, this is who you meet, this is where you go. We had to sort of look for our own,” said Michelle, who graduated from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, east of San Francisco, majoring in mass communication.

Michelle said she did some research and “found myself inspired by the mission. Later, I began to see the impact, implication and the result of our work.”

“As I learned more and more, I understood the situation. When you understand the situation, you see the problem and realize the areas where you can help and make a difference. Then you really want to reach out and that is when the passion starts to take over.”

Her father, according to Michelle, had long wanted to do something for the education sector partly due to the fact that companies here, including PT H.M. Sampoerna, the Indonesian tobacco company previouly owned by the family, had difficulties finding qualified Indonesian personnel for middle management positions. “His concern and sense of urgency to do something for education was further compounded during the 1997 economic crisis,” she said.

Putra Sampoerna had initially wanted to set up a school, but the idea was shelved in favor of a foundation which, according to Michelle, “requires less money and is easier to put together and a lot faster.”

Since its birth in 2001, the Sampoerna Foundation has provided scholarships to over 25,000 students from primary to tertiary education levels, both national and overseas.

According to Michelle, in general, the education in Indonesia is facing two major problems, which are related to the lack of access and quality of education.

Thousands of students at the secondary level are believed to drop out of school every year due to poverty, while those who manage to stay in school have to put up with teachers who either don’t meet the minimum teaching qualifications or have not mastered the subjects they are teaching.

“Less than 50 percent of teachers in all levels are qualified. On top of this, the majority of teachers do not master the subjects they are teaching,” she said, quoting data issued by the Ministry of National Education.

To improve the quality of teachers, the foundation launched last year the Sampoerna Foundation Teacher Institute, offering workshops and seminars that can inspire teachers and principals to make positive changes in their schools.

“We believe that teachers are the key element to improving the education sector because they hold the future of our children,” she said.

Collaborating with both national and overseas educational institutes, the institute offers a series of professional development programs designed to develop the professionalism of teachers and principals.

“Today, a teacher is not an interesting profession in society. We have to change this paradigm and one of our goals is to create a new breed of high quality teachers that can help us change the paradigm as well as provide our students with quality educational experiences that will enable them to compete not just locally but also regionally and globally,” she said.

Michelle, who for four years worked as communications manager of PT H.M. Sampoerna, had a rude awakening to the reality of university education in Indonesia through the Sampoerna Foundation’s scholars, who were mostly recruited from top state universities.

“We recruited (our scholars) and (told them that) they are great, academically As and that they are going to make it. We funded (their studies) and we were all excited waiting for the results. Well, the results came out — over 50 percent of the graduates were un-hirable, unemployed.”

“When that happened, the team said something was wrong,” Michelle said, adding that the experience prompted them to introduce mandatory internships during vacations.

“We looked for companies that wanted to work together with us and helped students by giving them first-hand approach of what business all about.”

The strategy seems to have worked well. According to Michelle, the unemployment rate for their scholars has been close to zero.

“For us to have unemployment rate among our graduates is a failure for the foundation. It means we’ve just thrown money away in various directions to individuals and nothing has come out of it,” she said.

One of the foundation’s prestigious scholarship programs is MBA Overseas Scholarship Program, where the foundation sends students to continue their post-graduate studies at the world’s leading business schools, such as Harvard Business School, the Wharton MBA and Kelloggs Business School.

In the past two years, it has launched various quality improvement programs such as the Sampoerna School of Business and Management in cooperation with the Bandung Institute of Science (ITB).

“We tried to play our part by instituting the Sampoerna School of Business and Management-ITB, where we work hand in hand with ITB to advance the quality of business schools in Indonesia.

“Our target is that in five to 10 years’ time, Sampoerna SBM-ITB will be listed as one of the best business schools in the Asia-Pacific, at least in top 50 best schools in the region. We want to help produce leaders who can compete with their counterparts from other countries,” Michelle said.

Michelle says, however, that foundation alone cannot fix these compounding problems.

“The role of the foundation is to become a facilitator and catalyst to invite others to join hands in rectifying the educational problems,” she said.

Kanis Dursin