President Joko Widodo launched the 5000 Muslim PhDs programme in December, aimed at academics in Indonesia’s Islamic tertiary education institutes. Joko Widodo stated that Islamic intellectuals were the key to ensuring that Islam and democracy continued to provide Indonesia with an approach to preventing extremeism.
The programme will be implemented in stages with 1000 scholarships available in 2015 and for the following four years. The scholarships will be available for study both in Indonesia and abroad and will be managed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA).

British Council commentary

Administration of the scholarship will prove challenging for the Ministry of Religious Affairs as it hasn’t had to administer such a large scale programme before. Identifying qualified PhD supervisors in sufficient numbers in Indonesia will be an issue as will be identifying enough candidates with required standards of English for study abroad. Arabic language capability will be better so maybe Arabic speaking destinations will be more popular. MORA is also undertaking an ambitious programme of ‘converting’ a number of its State Islamic Institutes (IAIN) into State Islamic Universities (UIN)and are looking for support in a number of areas including governance, research and specialist subject expertise such as Islamic Finance and Islamic Science.

Source : http://news.metrotvnews.com/read/2014/12/19/334211/presiden-jokowi-luncu...