Second Advisory Group Indonesia Meeting: A Major Step towards Sustainability in Indonesia

On the 10th of September we held the second Advisory Group (AG) meeting of the year in Indonesia. The AG members discussed concrete ideas for the next years and determined the next steps for the Alliance for Integrity after its current and last phase, in November 2023, when the multi-stakeholder initiative will be released into sustainability.

Headed by the newly elected Advisory Group Chair, Mr. Jeffrey Cheung from Indonesia-Hongkong Business Association, the meeting started off on an optimistic note. “If the Alliance for Integrity was a child, we are at a stage, where we have to start to release this child into growing up towards independence and we can do this by carefully guiding it,” said the Chair. Plans for this sustainability process are being discussed since 2019. This year, the Advisory Group Indonesia plans to establish a task force to accelerate the sustainability work and the further path to expand the Alliance for Integrity’s network by targeting new users and partners as well as establishing new collaborations among public and private sector actors along with civil society organizations.

The meeting was opened by updates from the AG members related to possible activities for the upcoming months. New fields of activities such as involving student networks at Universities (especially the students from economics) and young entrepreneurs were discussed. The representative from Paramadina University stated that it is important for the younger generations to implement integrity in their business early on since the beginning, allowing the company to build on an integrity based foundations.

Furthermore, the members reflected on the activities and collaborations with the public and private sector, especially on the development of a DUKU Training on Forestry together with the GIZ project ‘APCC’.

Our anticorruption DUKU training in the healthcare sector will be offered again and another interesting sector in the Indonesian economy to be explored may be Infrastructure. The members suggested that the Forestry DUKU Trainings would offer the opportunity to introduce the Alliance for Integrity to the palm oil sector. The palm oil sector has been one of the major sectors in Indonesia including established networks of companies, which may be a further asset for the Alliance for Integrity’s sustainability.

Finally, the members proposed to join forces with the public: “The Indonesian public sector has a tendency to organize trainings on their own. It will be good for the Alliance for Integrity to promote joint-trainings,” said Mr Satrio Anindito, the Program Manager in the Indonesia Global Compact Network (IGCN), opening the discussions. The IGCN representative suggested to partner up with the Indonesia Business Link (IBL) and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), while United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) proposed to join their regular discussions and exchanges with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KADIN). All three institutions, IBL, KPK and KADIN, will prove to be a major cornerstone for a sustainable Alliance for Integrity in cementing their presence in the business integrity and anti-corruption scene in Indonesia.

The meeting was closed by the Mr. Cheung, the AG Chair, summing up the promising ideas for activities by the AG members and stating that “as a child grows older, it needs to stand on its own two feet and we are carefully ensuring these feet are strong enough to face the challenges to come.”

Author: Margaretha, Allessandra