UNAIR NEWS – Universitas Airlangga students arrived in Central Lombok on Thursday, July 21, 2022. The journey to West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) is a part of community service activities in Assisted Village Development Program (PPDB) by UNAIR lecturers.
The community service program targets the Aik Berik village which has a lot of ecotourism potential to develop, from a waterfall view to culinary tours.
The community service program leader, Dr Hijrah Saputra ST MSc from the School of Postgraduate Studies (SPS) stated that UNAIR applies a new, more comprehensive paradigm for its community service programs.
“We want to solve problems in every field, social, economy, legal, health, culture, education, agriculture, food security, maritime, new and renewable energy, environment, and many more,” Dr Hijrah said.
The community service is in line with the government’s program of acceleration of the village economy. UNAIR encourages strengthening the implementation of science and technology, policy models, and research-based social engineering.
“The socio-economic development of the village will be faster with the building of infrastructure and open access,” he added.
Dr Hijrah believes that higher education assistance in the form of the downstream results of multidisciplinary research will encourage the acceleration of the progress quality and quantity in all fields. He hopes that UNAIR assisted villages will become the icons to drive village development, and become the model of science-techno and tourism parks.
UNAIR also attempted to improve the institutional aspects of Tourism Awareness Group (Pokdarwis), regulation, branding, and human resources. Generally, the problems in Aik Berik village include three aspects: preparation of human resources, provision of utilities, and facilitation of tourism village promotion.
Some of the UNAIR community service team members are Mhd. Zamal Nasution SSi MSc PhD from the School of Postgraduate Studies, Dr Ni Made Sukartini SE MSi MIDEC from the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), and Mochammad Reizza Al Ariyah SSos MSosio from the Faculty of Vocational Studies (FV). They participate in team and collaborative research between UNAIR, UGM, UNNES, and the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) of Yogyakarta.
The event which ended on Monday, July 25, 2022, was filled with community service and microseismic data collection. The whole program aims to develop Aik Berik Village into a disaster-resilient tourism village (Deswita).
Authors: Hijrah Saputra/ Intang Arifia
Editor: Feri Fenoria
