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Indonesia has 54,720 km of coastline — the second largest in the world — yet the traditional fishing industry is faced with poverty and underdevelopment. 25-year-old Utari Octavianty, together with her college friends, has made it her mission to change that through technology. They founded Aruna, an e-commerce platform that connects fishermen and their daily catch directly to customers.
Utari comes from a fishing family herself, so she knows the challenges facing the men, women, and families in the industry — whether it’s not having enough money to send their children to university, or feelings of hopelessness at the prospect of being forced out of their only way of life.
Utari saw the opportunity to use tech to empower the fishing community and took the risk. Through Aruna, fishermen sell their catch at a fair price through a digital fish auction platform and a marketplace for seafood products. Transparency lets fishermen see the real value of their catch, and ensures they will always get a fair trading opportunity. Now, over 2,000 fishermen use Aruna in 16 provinces across the archipelago.
One of Aruna’s biggest hurdles was getting fishermen, who are not used to using an app, to adopt this new technology. But the success of online payment and app technology in remote rural areas in China made her believe it was possible. They also recognized the need for a strong personal element to spread the new technology, so they employ “local heroes,” young tech-savvy millennials who assist the fishermen by posting photos and uploading info to facilitate transactions. Aruna also creates additional job opportunities for women in seafood processing, which in turn adds value to the fishermen’s products and boosts the local economy.
Now, Aruna is attracting attention and recognition in Indonesia and beyond, thanks in part to the fact that they won the recent Alipay-NUS Enterprise Social Innovation Challenge in April 2019. At the ASEAN Summit in June in Bangkok, President Joko Widodo hailed Aruna’s role in helping fishermen increase income by 20 percent and said such innovative steps “should be one of the focuses going forward,” Kompass reported.
Aruna’s connection with China is set to deepen. Utari and her colleague Farid Naufal Aslam is among dozens of entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia invited to a workshop under the 10×1000 Tech for Inclusion Program in China this week. Launched by Alipay and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, the program aims to provide training to 10,000 tech experts in emerging markets from both public and private sectors over the next 10 years.
Stay tuned for more documentaries like this one about ERTH, another finalist from Malaysia who discovers treasures from trash and this one about Wika Media, the finalist from Singapore bridging the barriers between the worlds of the Deaf and hearing. If there’s one thing these companies prove, it’s that the youth will lead the way in harnessing technology for good — maybe we shouldn’t chide them for always being on their phones.
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This Singapore start-up is breaking barriers between the worlds of the Deaf and hearing
