Reading House for children in Damen Village, Asmat, South Papua

Papua has the lowest net school attendance rate, at 67.4% for junior high schools and 48.8% for senior high schools (UNICEF, 2020). One reason for this low school attendance rate is local attitudes that discourage children from receiving an education. Given the dire conditions in Papua, the need for literacy development is a top priority.

Presidential Regulation No. 131 of 2015 states that Asmat is a disadvantaged area, thus categorizing it as a 3T (furthermost and inaccessible) area. South Papua Province has the fourth-highest percentage of poor people in Indonesia.

Not only in terms of poverty, the Central Statistics Agency also recorded in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI), where in 2024 South Papua Province was the province with the fourth lowest HDI in Indonesia, at 60.86 (far below the national HDI figure of 75.02). This again highlights education as a crucial issue, because the HDI assessment considers knowledge as one of the basic dimensions in human resource development.

A Reading House for children in Damen will support the development of the Asmat community in general.

Collected

Rp 0

from Rp 612.000.000

Tercapai

0%

Equip the Damen village, Asmat with a reading house

Support the Children's Reading House in Damen, Asmat

Low Level of Literacy in Asmat

  • The following are the results of a 2022 Wahana Visi Indonesia study* that collected data on children's reading abilities in Asmat with the primary goal of comprehensive reading:

    Of the 46 third-grade students in four elementary schools assisted by WVI, it showed that:

    • Only 5 (4 male, 1 female) of the 46 students (11%) were categorized as readers with comprehension

    • No students were categorized as readers

    • 41 (27 male, 14 female) of the 46 students (89%) were categorized as non-readers

    *The survey was conducted on third-grade children using the School-based Test About Reading (STAR) method (World Vision International, 2017). For comparison, 4 out of 10 children in the districts of Sentani, Jayapura, Jayawijaya, and Biak Numfor had the ability to read with comprehension.