It was the co-founder of one of India’s biggest IT companies that built the world’s largest government-linked identity programme. And now the co-founder of Indonesia’s first decacorn, the ride-hailing-app-turned-super-app Gojek, is taking a leaf out of Nandan Nilekani’s book. To be fair, Nadiem Makarim did sort of do this in October 2019, when he left the company he founded and scaled into a tech giant to become Indonesia's Minister for Education and Culture. The Harvard Business School graduate will forever be associated with the company, even though he’s no longer the CEO. Currently, he’s putting all that experience and learnings from Gojek into creating another super app. And this time it’s in the field of education, and, in an unorthodox move, aimed at teachers rather than students. Launched officially only in February, Merdeka Mengajar aspires to help the three million teachers in Indonesia to teach, learn, and create. And Makarim made it clear that he wants Merdeka Mengajar to be built on top of user-generated content, not ministry-disseminated content. Indonesia has a habit of rejigging its public school curriculum every time there’s a new minister, and Makarim wants to make sure that this time, along with upskilling, the teachers also have a choice whether to adopt the new curriculum or not. But with great power comes great responsibility. Getting Merdeka Mengajar up and running is just the beginning. And this is no Gojek where one can move fast and break things. To truly make it fly, Makarim will have to grapple with challenges like driving adoption across the archipelago, hiring good tech talents, and navigating governmental bureaucracy to speed up the platform’s development. Can he do all these before the next presidential election that is due to happen in 2024?
