modDatetime: 2025-03-17 For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about an initiative supporting Indonesian entrepreneurs to bolster economic growth.
As Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth-most-populous country, Indonesia has an impressive record of growth. Between 1999 and 2018 the country cut its poverty rate by more than half, to just under ten percent. A key contributor of that growth has been the country’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — which account for nearly 97 percent of Indonesia’s domestic employment and 56 percent of its total business investment. Despite this, there have been relatively few resources to help Indonesian entrepreneurs think about how to sustainably grow their businesses as part of a flourishing broader business community.
A newly launched two-year program, led by the international entrepreneurship organization Transformational Business Network (TBN) and supported with $200,000 in funding from the John Templeton Foundation, will help equip dozens of Indonesian entrepreneurs to purposefully grow their businesses. TBN will identify promising entrepreneurs and provide training and coaching to help them responsibly scale their businesses, potentially creating hundreds of jobs and improving the lives of tens of thousands of low-income people who benefit from the ripple effects of positive economic development.