September 27 – 29: SEATA Members visit Jakarta

On September 27–19, 2016, SEATA conducted a mission to Jakarta. The mission was attended by SEATA founders Chairman Alvin Lee, Lizum Mishra, Sajin Varghese, Alan Kaufman, and Christian Wetterberg. It successfully carried out three primary purposes: to engage with key government stakeholders and position SEATA as a resource of knowledge and contributor to industry policymaking; to understand the Indonesian context of value of play and identify opportunities for intervention in 2017; and to host a workshop on toy standardization that served to share best practices about how Indonesia’s standardization system could better support toy industry growth as well as cement SEATA’s partnership with the Ministry of Industry.

Over the course of the mission’s three days, SEATA met with: the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Trade, the EU Delegation to Indonesia and ASEAN, the Ministry for Women Empowerment and Children Protection, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, and academia with a focus on early childhood education. These meetings gave SEATA insights into the direction for standardization and trade policies; government programs for early childhood education and human capital development; a new draft Toy Industry Roadmap to be put into effect in 2017; and general sentiments toward the benefits of play. They also served as opportunities for SEATA to discuss bottlenecks faced by toy manufacturers and importers in Indonesia and make concrete policy recommendations to overcome them.