Ambassador Salem Belfaqih discusses expanding scholarships for Yemeni students in Jakarta
Yemen Herald News 
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Yemen’s ambassador to Indonesia discussed expanding scholarships for Yemeni students with the rector of the Indonesian International Islamic University on Monday.
Ambassador Salem Belfaqih met Jamhari Makruf in Jakarta, the state news agency Saba reported.
The two discussed ways to strengthen academic and educational cooperation, the agency said.
They also addressed academic exchange programmes and capacity-building initiatives.
The two sides exchanged views on the latest developments in Yemen, Saba said.
They said continued coordination mattered for the academic partnership and for wider educational and cultural cooperation between the two countries, according to the agency.
This account rests on Saba, the news agency of Yemen’s internationally recognised government. Yemen Herald found no independent confirmation of the meeting.
Saba rendered the rector’s name as Jamhari Ma’ruf and described him as the university’s president. The university uses the spelling Jamhari Makruf and calls the post rector.
The Indonesian International Islamic University is a public institution under Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs.
Joko Widodo, then Indonesia’s president, initiated it through Presidential Regulation No. 57 of 2016.
The regulation establishing the university was signed on June 29, 2016. Construction of the campus began two years later.
The campus covers 142.5 hectares at Cisalak, in Depok, West Java. Depok sits on the southern edge of the Jakarta metropolitan area.
The university teaches only at master’s and doctoral level.
English is the medium of instruction, with Arabic used in courses on Islamic sciences and Indonesian in some others.
It has faculties of Islamic Studies, Social Sciences, Economics and Business, Education, and Science and Technology.
A course on Wasathiyah, or moderate, Islam is compulsory under an academic regulation the rectorate issued in 2021.
The university reported 1,496 applicants from 31 countries for the 2022-23 academic year.
International applicants made up 35 percent of that pool.
It admitted 150 students, 107 to master’s programmes and 43 to doctoral ones.
Indonesia’s education ministry recorded 25 academic staff, 189 postgraduate students and 40 doctoral students at the university in 2022.
The university runs a scholarship with the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education, known by its Indonesian initials LPDP.
The fund was established in 2011.
The scholarship covers three years for master’s students and four years for doctoral students, and is open to Indonesian and international applicants.
Jamhari Makruf became rector in 2024.
He told the Jakarta Post at the time that he was committed to world-class education and to promoting a moderate reading of Islam.
Yemeni students have sought places abroad through the war, and the government programme that funds them has been under strain for years.
Yemen’s then minister of higher education told Al-Fanar Media in 2022 that every Yemeni university had been affected by the war, directly or indirectly.
He said institutions in areas that escaped fighting still lacked money to hire faculty, run laboratories or repair failing water and power systems.
About 4,800 Yemeni students held government scholarships abroad at that time, the minister said, and were waiting on stipends as the country’s oil exports fell.
He put the payments at about 7 million dollars every three months, against 12 million dollars in 2019.
Those figures date from 2022 and Yemen Herald found no more recent official accounting of the programme.
Other placements run outside the government scheme.
The Scholar Rescue Fund arranges posts for Yemeni academics at universities in Europe, North America and Malaysia.
UNESCO worked with the Global Partnership for Education and the German agency GIZ on a transitional education plan for Yemen.
Indonesia has drawn students from across the Muslim world to its state Islamic institutions, and the Depok university was set up to widen that reach.
Belfaqih has held a series of meetings in Jakarta in recent weeks.
He met Saud Purwanto Krisnuan, director general of protocol and consular affairs at Indonesia’s foreign ministry, on Sept. 1, Saba reported.
That meeting covered bilateral relations, developments in Yemen and the region, and coordination between the embassy and the ministry on the concerns of Yemeni citizens.
Belfaqih reviewed the Yemeni government’s work on security, stability and economic recovery at that meeting, the agency said.
He has also sought Indonesian development cooperation and discussed cultural cooperation with an Indonesian minister in earlier meetings reported by Saba.
Yemen and Indonesia have discussed activating a joint committee and widening bilateral cooperation, the Yemeni news site Yemen Monitor reported.
The university has courted foreign missions directly over admissions.
Jamhari Makruf set out its scholarship schemes, and who they are aimed at, at an ambassadors’ briefing hosted by Indonesia’s foreign ministry, the university said.
Saba has not reported any agreement arising from Monday’s meeting, and the university has not published an account of it.
Monday’s meeting took place as fighting escalated on Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
Houthi forces took the port city of Mocha on Sept. 10 as government troops withdrew. They reached the island of Mayyun, in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, in the days that followed.
The International Organization for Migration said 85,818 people had been displaced by the fighting, 82,164 of them since the start of September.
More than 2,000 have crossed to Djibouti, landing near Obock on its northern coast, the agency said.
Saba did not say how many Yemeni students hold places at the university.
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