On 3rd October 2022, ANGIN as a part of Koalisi Ekonomi Membumi B20 and Indonesia Impact Alliance (the country’s budding National Advisory Board of Impact Investment) was attending a workshop that aims to facilitate investor-enterprise ‘deep-dive’ convening to kickstart communication around SDG Investments within the private sector at Hotel Mercure Jakarta Sabang. This workshop serves as a follow-up to the Indonesia SDG Investor Map launched by UNDP Indonesia and UNDP’s SDG Impact, supported by the Government of Indonesia and the Center for Impact Investing and Practices [CIIP] at Temasek Trust. The Investor Map highlights 18 investment opportunity areas (“IOAs”) and business models across six SDG-enabling sectors, such as Education, Healthcare, Agriculture, Renewable Energy, Financial Services and Infrastructure.
To kickstart the conversation and facilitate a strategic partnership between the stakeholders, the event gathered up various key players operating in six SDG-enabling sectors, namely governments, enablers, investors, startups, and private companies, in order to drive greater volumes of capital to accelerate SDG progress eventually.
The Focus Group Discussion (FGD) session in the event was split into several break-out sessions for different sectors. In the breakout-room session, ANGIN was glad to be able to participate in the healthcare sector. Along with investors, enablers and entrepreneurs, we discussed opportunities, challenges, and action points in this sector.
The discussion started with a brief data showcase by the UNDP team, as seen below:
Seeing healthcare is not only about the prescription availability, but also how the ecosystem and accessibility of other healthcare facilities such as laboratories, pharmacies, etc. This is something that we have not seen equally throughout the country. For people in a second or third city to access telemedicine is one thing, but for them to actually claim the medicine from the nearest pharmacies is another thing. It is because not every pharmacy in Indonesia accepts digital prescriptions or provides digital services. This condition is shown by the pandemic last year when only 25 per cent of telemedicine users claimed the prescriptions. This data shows that the country needs to improve the quality of pharmacies and medical devices to smoothen the process of prescriptions claim and delivery. Especially the pandemic has changed our way in to get things done where digitalization is the key. However, this matter may cause by the high price of primary care, since we still import almost all of our medical devices used in the country.
Therefore, there is an urgency to tap into this, as this matter is highly regulated and controlled by the government. The existence of investors then is deemed to be important in this matter, and the investors must be informed promptly regarding the regulation and compliances within the country. Other than that, talent readiness is also the key, since every change in the system must be applied across the system.
Hence, here the UNDP aims to bridge the startups and the company to the government – for them to have a dialogue to improve the awareness between the parties of their parts and what they can do in the schemes. The regulatory landscape also needs to be reviewed and improved since clearer regulation may support and encourage investment opportunities in the country. In the end, healthcare accessibility needs an improvement where we should move towards primary care and digitalization is one of the tools to actualize it.
After all, the opportunity is huge but also challenging. We need all the strategic stakeholders to gather to solve this matter. We also need the data for each identified IOAs, such as the fundraising amount, the instruments, and other related data, in order to be able to blend the financial approach as one of the solutions to this matter too.
Author: Adriani Putri & Ursula Toding
Editor: Saskia Tjokro