In a small village surrounded by palm oil plantations in West Kalimantan, Southern Indonesia, a 10-year-old girl sometimes disappears from school. Her parents leave before sunrise; no one at home asks about her day or helps with homework. Her teachers feel caught between government targets and a community that has quietly decided education isn’t the priority. There is land to inherit. There is work in the plantation. Why would she need school?

This girl’s story is not unique. It echoed across Indonesia’s thousands of islands: in fishing villages by the sea, in overcrowded city settlements, and remote tropical forest communities, where poverty, distance and cultural expectations often pull children out of school and into work.

Indonesia’s national average of schooling years stands at nine years, barely enough to complete junior high. But that figure hides a harder truth: children in Jakarta average 11 years of education, while those in the island of Papua average just 5. The gap runs not only between provinces but between islands, between cities and villages. It shows up in whether there is a school in each village, how far a child must walk to reach one, and whether the teacher in that classroom truly has what she needs. These are not just logistical problems. They are deeply human ones: shaped by physical distance, , but also by culture, government priority, poverty, gender inequality and what families believe education is even for.

This is where our work begins. Before designing anything, the Good Shepherd sisters sit with children, parents, teachers, and local authorities to understand what is genuinely getting in the way. They trace problems back to their roots and look for the people within communities who already care and want to act, grounded in the belief that lasting change can only come from within.

Our purpose is grounded in one simple belief: every child is born curious. Every child has a natural love for learning. Our work is about protecting that and restoring it when it has been lost. – Catharina Indirastuti, Mission Development Office Indonesia

Their work operates across three levels. With children, they create safe spaces where curiosity is welcomed and learning feels joyful. With parents and school communities, they open conversations about children’s rights: not only the right to be protected from harm, but the active right to learn. With teachers, they work to build awareness of what truly matters in learning and to make the classroom a place children actually want to be.

In  Dua, the Good Shepherd sisters established a Rumah Belajar Dara Marimbang — a community learning house. Not a school. Not a programme with targets and formal curricula. Just a safe, welcoming space where children can come after school to read, play, do homework, and be with local facilitators who believe in them. The simplicity is deliberate: rooted in what the community actually needed, run by people from within it.

Alongside the learning house, they engaged teachers on what support would be genuinely meaningful, and held patient, honest conversations with parents about what their children needed beyond food and shelter. Slowly, the village began to see that education is not the school’s responsibility alone. It belongs to everyone.

The results resist easy measurement, but they are real: children who had stopped going to school have started coming back – not because they were forced to, but because somewhere in that small learning house, they remembered that learning could feel good.

What our work in Indonesia illustrates is that keeping a child in school requires more than a classroom and a teacher. It requires a community that collectively decides its children’s futures matter. In 2026, sisters and partners are scaling this work further, bringing wider communities together around the shared understanding that every child needs more than a classroom: they need the people around them to be committed to their right to learn.

(This article is adapted from a speech given by Catharina Indirastuti at the virtual launch of the “Child Protection in Asia Pacific” publication)