This is a comment on an editorial titled âHuge untapped tax revenueâ, (The Jakarta Post, Dec
his is a comment on an editorial titled 'Huge untapped tax revenue', (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 15).
It would be very useful for helping orphans in Indonesia (some 440,000) if the Indonesian government could improve taxation and start to support education for these high-risk children's caregivers.
As long as the government does not have a monitoring system for children and youth at risk, half of these children will remain unemployed in adult life. They often end up involved in crime and abuse, and thus constitute a destabilizing factor for a future democratic society.
Talking about moving these children to foster care will not solve the problem, since foster care also needs extensive government monitoring in order to succeed, as experienced by many other countries.
We do that based on international research and in a joint venture ' in order to educate as many as possible of the 8,000 orphanage staff members and leaders in research-based care training. But we have to scrape together money for the project from all kinds of funds outside Indonesia. Nevertheless, we have so far trained 250 leaders and translated the programs into Indonesian and offer them for free, as we do in 20 other countries.
However, a major effort to create monitoring systems for all these children (the greatest untapped resource for Indonesia's future) demands a government-level and government-financed effort for a project this size.
Niels Peter Rygaard
Aarhus, Denmark
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