Dewis Akbar

Dewis Akbar is creating community-based learning models around ICT skills to encourage families and children in Indonesia’s disadvantaged communities to invest in their education and to prepare them for problem-solving in the digital age. In doing so, he is enabling a problem-solving generation of independent and inspired Indonesian natives who are self-reliant learners, prepared to flourish in the age of digitization and automation.

Through a low-cost, self-sustainable, mobile computer lab, Dewis is bringing the computer and basic programming skills to children in remote areas of Indonesia to inspire their creativity and interest in learning. Many schools in rural areas lack basic computing infrastructure and resources, and even in the capital city of Jakarta, only 16 out of 2546 schools used ICT in learning as of 2014. On average, there are 136 students for each computer in the Indonesian education system, and only about a quarter of Indonesian students have access to a computer at home. This means that the wealth of information available via the Internet is currently inaccessible to a very large percentage of the population. Dewis’s Lab on a Bike is changing this.

Dewis is building a decentralized and localized model of ICT education to create access to a suite of digital, ICT, and programming skills for last mile communities in Indonesia. He has developed a pop-up computer lab that utilizes idle spaces in schools after hours, low-cost packable tech, and off-duty teachers to reach these communities by motorbike. Each teacher travels by motorbike with the technology, reaching about 6 schools in a week. The curriculum is designed to inspire and enable creative thinking, problem-solving, and lifelong learning.

While Dewis partners with the schools for the use of space, he also collaborates with parents to ensure that all our investments in the child’s learning. Once persuaded, parents pay a small fee (less than $1 per month), which makes Lab on a Bike self-sustainable, and thus a business model that can be replicated by teachers and others.

Starting in Garut, Dewis hopes to change the current pattern of education where staggering numbers of children drop out without continuing to learn and problem-solve. He has already started cultivating a new spirit and capacity for continuous learning for the development of self and the region among the rural poor that he works with. Within a year, one group of students who had never worked with computers before won a national competition for their robotic simulation of the traditional Indonesian gamelan instrument. He hopes to shift mindsets in these communities towards one that capitalizes on the digital age for constant self-development and changemaking while providing a scalable model for reaching villages that suffer the last mile problem in education.

In a country of 260 million and the world’s 4th largest population, more than 50% live in rural areas and 43% are below the age of 25; the latter figure is set to rise to 53% by 2045. In these disadvantaged areas, many Indonesian children today lack digital literacy and the basic skills to thrive in our current digital age. They lack opportunities and access to develop ICT skills and a mindset of continuous self-improvement to drive them to be entrepreneurial and resourceful in building their own pathways towards continual growth and personal development. To Dewis, this is the reason why Indonesia lacks innovators who can deliver and implement solutions for the places and people that need them, especially in rural areas. This condition is also driving a brain drain in Indonesia.

This mindset problem is compounded by the lack of quality education for technology literacy in the existing education system of Indonesia. In terms of the infrastructure on a national level, few primary schools have working computer labs. In the rural Garut area, this dips to an even lower figure. Only a quarter of students have a computer at home, and on average there are 136 students per computer in education. 66% own a smartphone, but young people with access mostly use them for gaming. For families and children in the most remote areas of Indonesia continual education beyond the primary school years is an additional challenge. As many as 1 million students drop out of school after primary education, lacking the ICT tools and other basic skills to unlock their potential in solving problems. Conducive to these drop out rate are the challenging economical situations, scarce opportunities, and the lack of conducive environments for ICT learning communities.

This lack of mindset towards continuing to upgrade and upskill in resource-scarce conditions presents a huge drain on Indonesia’s potential future talent. Families believe that education gets in the way of life, and often cannot afford the costs of travelling to further education anyway. This is compounded by a lack of awareness of the power of the digital age - only seeing the computer as a gaming platform and largely unaware of the great potential and power of it in the age of digital transformation. These trends obscure the potential of computers and digital devices to provide meaningful access to the Internet where information is available to help them model solutions and continuously develop themselves and their communities.

The remote areas of Indonesia where Dewis works are excluded from accessing ICT education because of the expensive cost of equipment. While some families have smartphones, they are not viewed as learning platforms and data is expensive. Resources are concentrated in the cities and this means that there are limited resources for schools, resulting in a lack of infrastructure and no space for ICT education. In addition, in remote schools, there is no security for expensive computer equipment, putting it at risk of theft. Furthermore, past and existing efforts by others in this space, such as the government and NGOs, have resulted in non-sustainable labs where computing equipment is dropped in these places without thinking about the end-user mindset and perspective, for instance.

Dewis is targeting several strategic levers in driving his vision for digital literacy, continuous self-improvement, and independent local development. They are: 1) the creation of a popup, mobile computer lab, 2) engagement of parents to value and invest in this learning, and 3) development of a replicable business model to enable scale. The pieces come together as an offering of a suite of digital tools for marginalized communities in Indonesia.

In his work, he operationalizes his vision by establishing a network of teachers who currently cover about 6 schools per week. The teachers are able to provide portable, small, and compact computer parts brought on motorcycles from village to village. The children are quickly able to assemble these simple and light parts into a small computer for their learning. The approach is based on a standard tailored curriculum that specifically caters to the immediate gaps in digital skills for children in these areas. The curriculum also caters to the different levels of interest for each student. Dewis provides opportunities and mentoring for children to enter national and international competitions through his platform.

The pop-up computer lab model utilises existing community and school spaces. The mini-computers run on Raspberry Pi monitors and are independent of the Internet (Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer that promotes the teaching of basic computer science). Inspired by mobile snack sellers in Indonesia, the computers are packable into small transparent containers that can be stacked on the back of bikes.

The model is largely run by his team of teachers. Dewis mobilizes the teachers by offering an additional income stream through his platform, and each student pays a token amount of 10,000 IDR (less than 1 USD) to attend 4 sessions each month. In these weekly sessions, the honorary teachers conduct the lesson for 30 minutes before allowing the kids to freely explore what they would like to do or develop with these gained skills. Having fun, problem-solving for their community, inculcating a joy and thirst for learning, and practical-based learning are elements that are highly emphasized in the work. Dewis also engages older students who have already been through the program as assistants in the classes, enabling them to further their own development while helping deliver the curriculum.

In each village, Dewis starts by building a relationship with the parents and designs different approaches to encouraging the mindset shift. He takes the time to meet with them and understand what motivates them to gain that initial foothold to demonstrate the impact and shift mindsets around digital literacy. For instance, in one mountain community near Garut, he initially faced heavy resistance from the community, in particular, the parents; the prevalent mindset towards education in rural areas is negative and there is a perception that education gets in the way of working on typical economic activities such as farming. He eventually mobilized the support of parents, who typically provide 10,000 IDR per month for their child. He engages parents to see the support as an investment into their child’s ICT education.

Lab on Bike is a replicable and low-cost business model that others can take up. The equipment takes an investment of 10 Million IDR and the model reaps 1.8 million IDR a month in revenue. Taking into account teacher costs, this results in 900,000 IDR a month. From a consumer perspective, the cost per student of 10,000 IDR is also highly affordable, given that the average amount spent on snacks per day is around 5000 IDR.

For scale and mass adoption, Dewis works with the local government, who are watching his model as one to possibly replicate for the rest of remote Indonesia that also faces huge last-mile issues in development. His work still has a lot of room to grow, having successfully run the pilot in Garut. He aims to reach 5000 young Indonesians by 2019.

Through his work, he has already begun to see a shift among the youth he works with, who are improving in basic digital literacy and have started building applications of their own towards developing and problem-solving for their community. Adilah of SDN Regol 10, for example, built a nationally-acclaimed simulator to bring costly traditional gamelan arts to poorer communities, and has mapped poor families during a disastrous flood to create more effective rebuilding and assistance efforts - all by the age of 12. He has reached 19 schools and 700 students so far, aiming to reach 10-20 more schools in the coming year. The children have managed to enter national and international competitions and report a 70-80% rate of skills mastery. Dewis is proving the model for others to take up, including the government.

Born in Garut, Indonesia, Dewis firmly believes that Indonesians have to develop a spirit of lifelong learning to prepare themselves for a future of automation. As a child, Dewis entered primary school at 4.5 years of age because he was bored, and grew up with a strong entrepreneurial drive to create income streams to support himself. For instance, he opened up his collection of comics at a library so that the public could rent during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. He eventually studied Computer Science in university before starting work initially as a programmer and lecturer in the city of Bogor. Dewis possesses a childlike curiosity and wonder around problem-solving and technologically-informed entrepreneurship.

Dewis is a strong advocate of developing local economies and growing the unique comparative advantages that each region in Indonesia has to offer, especially for the regions that are remote and economically disadvantaged such as his native Garut. After his mother's death in 2010, he came home to Garut to accompany his father and assist him in farm management in Garut, West Java. This experience made him realize the value of the farm as a local asset in a region known to be remote and disadvantaged.

He personally seeks to innovate to strengthen this asset and encourages others to do the same with the assets they already have in their communities. He began learning from the Internet how to improve the farm yield and came to realize that a lot of applied technology is already available, but access to those tools for self-development and local development is only available readily in certain areas.