Indonesia seeks UK partners to build 10 new universities

The Indonesian president has announced plans to build 10 new universities in an aggressive move to meet the demand for medical personnel, including doctors and dentists.

“We start to build 10 universities this year. One of them is the university of government administration, where we can prepare our best children to be future leaders of this nation,” said Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, during an address at the Indonesia Economic Outlook 2026 meeting in Jakarta on 13 February.

The new universities will focus largely on medical education, dentistry, pharmacy, and science and technology fields, the president said during a visit to London on 20 January, during which he invited leading UK universities to partner with the Indonesian government in establishing the new institutions.

Indonesia currently suffers a shortage of medical workers, medical researchers and specialist doctors, leading to poor health services delivery.

Data from Indonesia’s health ministry shows that every year, the country has a shortage of approximately 140,000 doctors.

“We only produce around 9,000 doctors each year. So, it will take years, and by the time we reach 140,000 doctors, more doctors will retire as well. This calls for a strategic plan,” the president said.

High standards

“I want to adopt English standards, the highest educational standards from the best universities in the UK,” he said, according to a press release by the Office of Assistant to the Deputy Cabinet Secretary.

In addition, Prabowo outlined plans to develop internationally accredited teaching hospitals at each campus, the report said.

Several UK universities have extensive partnerships with Indonesia’s top universities, such as the University of Indonesia, Gajah Mada University, and some local universities.

King’s College London, or KCL, in January opened a campus in the Singhasari Special Economic Zone in East Java, offering masters programmes in digital economy and digital futures, supporting national priorities for developing technology and tourism, according to the KCL news website.

“We want to improve this partnership into a full-blown joint project of building a high standard of education,” Prabowo said.

Indonesia’s Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin has introduced reforms to the medical education system by training specialist doctors in hospitals as opposed to universities in efforts to produce more specialist doctors and to address an existing system that is “too exclusive, too expensive and inefficient”, according to publicly made comments.

Sadikin said around 3,000 specialist doctors are produced annually, which meets only 10% of the demand for specialist doctors, which is around 30,000.

“It means it will take more than 10 years to meet the demand,” Sadikin said in May 2025.

“Indonesia is short of specialist doctors because its education is still limited in top universities. They are only able to produce a relatively constant number of graduates while demand for specialist doctors gets higher and higher throughout the country,” Sadikin told the House of Representatives, as reported by University World News.

The minister stated that not only had Indonesia been experiencing a medical worker and doctor shortage, but it had also been suffering uneven distribution of specialist doctors for the last few decades.

The president’s plan to build 10 world-class universities will address the issue, according to an official press release.

Data from the health ministry reveals that only 24 faculties in Indonesia provide specialist doctors education. With his new policy, 420 hospitals throughout the country will also run specialist doctor education.

Zainal Muttaqin, a medical professor and neurosurgeon specialist at the Diponegoro University, Central Java, said the data needs further explanation.

Regional distribution

“The problem does not rest on the number of doctors produced, but on the distribution among regions,” Muttaqin said.

Many places in the country need doctors, but only a few of them have hospitals and decent living conditions for doctors. “In such places, doctors cannot send their grown-up children to schools because there are no junior or high schools there. Low government budget makes things worse,” he told University World News.

Muttaqin gave an example of OB-GYN (Obstetrician-Gynaecology) specialists, whose number is around 6,000, while the number of hospitals in Indonesia is only 3,000. This situation allows the specialists to work in three hospitals. And if the distance between hospitals is significant, the doctors struggle to serve their patients.

Brain haemorrhage symptoms need to be treated within four hours. It means there must be one neurosurgeon specialist within a four-hour transport radius. Obstetric cases should be treated within one hour. It means there should be one OB-Gyn specialist within a one-hour transport radius.

“So, the realistic solution is to build health infrastructure and living conditions in accordance with the doctors’ needs,” Muttaqin said.

Communication and higher education expert at the State Islamic University Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung, Asep Saeful Muhtadi, said that building universities is one thing, but building a reputation is something else.

“You can build a university or several universities in one or two years, but building their reputation, let alone a ‘world-class’ reputation, takes decades,” Muhtadi told University World News.

“And there’s no guarantee they will earn it,” he added.

He pointed to academic culture, research quality and publications as indicators of university reputation, which take a lot of effort.

“You cannot build a university, even with huge funds, recruit professors and highly selected students, use English, and call it a ‘world class’ university. It’s not self-proclaimed. No, the world-class reputation should come from acknowledgement by outside parties, after they see how your university performs,” Muhtadi said.

Instead of building new universities, Muhtadi said, it will be much more efficient to improve the current medical education in universities.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, Muhtadi said he knows what ‘world-class’ university means. “I graduated from a world-class university whose reputation was built for decades with a high standard of research, curriculum, and lecturers,” he said.