Around 90-95% of Indigenous communities in Indonesia are working on informal working groups, where according to the Indonesia NAPs 2025, climate change contributes to the damage of 59.40% of the Indonesia workforce in the informal sector. South Hulu Sungai Regency is one of the 200 regions in Indonesia most vulnerable to climate change (Syamsyudin, 2022), where in the Loksado district, there are 11 Indigenous villages that have the highest vulnerability to climate change. Within my thesis, I found that Traditional farming knowledge, such as harvest timing, is no longer reliable, leading to unstable yields from plantations where, from 2021 to 2021, there were two years without any harvest season. Since 1991-2021, at least 40 Indigenous families had been migrated due of hunger month, also known as “Pacekelik”.
Within the status quo, there has been no climate education project conducted where youth and children, as the future generation, never gain the tools to create more resilience communities towards climate change impact. These are aggravated within the Education Bill 2021, where the government doesn’t have any obligation to build only any formal education in the village, where it led children and youth not having access to education, including climate education. Even in the sub-district, there is a school. Still, again, the curriculum doesn’t align with the community's needs, where it focuses more on academic instead of adaptation and mitigation on climate change impact.
Meraki (Merdeka Anak Muda Indonesia) an Indigenous Climate Youth Incubator project started within the first phases, which focus on a series of workshops that are divided into 3 core learning which Global Citizenship Education and Social Emotional Learning (GCED-SEL), entrepreneurship, and environmental problem-solving. In the series of workshop the participants gain diverse learning tools while solving diverse climate issues within game-fication, business and advocacy tools. Then, the Meraki project continues within a grouping of Indigenous youth with the same interest in climate issues, where, within these phases, the participants will receive mentoring to create their climate initiatives while gain seed fund for their project, mentors facilitate the process and share their resources based on the group needed where it can be project tools, stakeholder strategies, and monitoring and evaluation analyst. After they create their own project, we comeback into a huge group position where every participant shares their best practices and their recommendations to the local government within a policy brief approach while share their project. Within Meraki, the participants are encouraged to make impact from downstream on the ground to the upstream on the policy level while build an continue dialogue spaces to made intervention on the local government policy and project related on climate and environmental protection areas.
1. 100 Indigenous Youth aged 14-25 received Incubator Program that support more resilience Indigenous youth toward climate change impact
2. Improvement in participants' existing GCED-SEL skills by up to 56%, Environmental Management Skills by up to 76%, and entrepreneurship skills by 91.3%.
3. 100 individual climate initiatives ranging from composting and reusable drinking containers, and much more
4. 8 group project initiatives ranging from environmental health projects, well-being projects, to environmental preservation adventures
5. Indirect impact on 650 youth through social media and existing projects.
6. I had chance to share my work of Meraki at 18th Expert Mechanism on The Rights of Indigenous Peoples in July 2025
Recently, after the finalization of the program, Meraki had been establish an Indigenous youth network that use whatsapp as the main communication channel where within these platform, we collect 230+ Indigenous youth that came from these 4 remotes areas on these sub-regency where on these platform, we bridge the access on information related climate change, funding opportunities to consultation opportunities within government and UN agency. Now, we want to create an open website to share our resources while conducting a training-of-trainers to empower more Indigenous youth to engage in our program.
You can contact us @literasianakbanua on Instagram or via email literasianakbanua@gmail.com, where we can discuss how we adapted our module into your ecosystem and work, since this module is really adaptable
