South-South Cooperation (SSC) is not new to Indonesia. In fact, it has roots in the early days of the Republic of Indonesia. In 1946, as part of efforts to gain international recognition for the newly born republic, Indonesia sent 500,000 tons of rice to India, which was experiencing a severe famine. This early humanitarian aid brought Indonesia much-needed recognition from countries in Asia and the Middle East. It also planted the seeds for Indonesia’s cooperation with the decolonised territories that were to become part of the Global South. Indonesia’s cooperation with other developing countries gained ground with the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 and the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Indonesia was one of the main initiators of the movement, and the concept became part of the country’s foreign policy. Indonesia’s current discourse on South-South Cooperation still reflects this legacy with terminology employed such as solidarity and, in the case of Palestine, self-determination. The decolonisation rhetoric of the Sukarno regime was supplanted by an emphasis on the development objective of SSC in the Suharto era, during which Indonesia embarked on the large-scale provision of technical knowledge to many countries in Asia and Africa. Under the umbrella of the Non-Aligned Movement following the 1992 NAM Summit hosted by Indonesia in Jakarta, Indonesia stepped up its technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC) by establishing a number of training programmes in Asia and Africa, mostly in agriculture, fisheries, and family planning. This was mainly implemented by Indonesian South-South Technical Cooperation (ISSTC) under the State Secretariat. In 1995, Indonesia established a NAM Centre for South-South Technical Cooperation (NAM CSSTC), with poverty alleviation, development of small and medium enterprises, health, agriculture, environment, and information and communication technology as its main thematic areas.

Indonesia’s SSC covers a large spectrum of countries. The National Coordination Team (NCT) of South-South and Triangular Cooperation of the Government of Indonesia recently reported that the majority of recipients are countries in Africa, in particular Tanzania, Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Algeria, and Sudan. Indonesia is also quite active with Asian countries such as Laos, Nepal, and Cambodia, and has cooperation with the former Soviet Central Asian Republics, in particular Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, with which an agricultural development initiative is being launched in partnership with the Islamic Development Bank. In the last few years, Indonesia has been engaged with transition countries such as Afghanistan and Myanmar. According to the NCT, the current administration has stated that Indonesian SSC priority countries will also include Palestine, which has been the traditional focus for a number of decades, Timor Leste and South Pacific countries (including countries of the Melanesian Spearhead Group – MSG).