JAKARTA - Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung said Saturday that 2027 will mark the first year his administration rolls out the city's own LPDP scholarship program, fully funded by the provincial government to send Jakarta students to study abroad.

Speaking at a national seminar in Central Jakarta, Pramono called it "the first time I will roll out what's called LPDP Jakarta," saying the program would be fully funded by the provincial government. Early enrollment will be modest, he said, but sending even a few students to top universities abroad, including Columbia University, could shift the fortunes of their families, according to iNews.id.

The program, still commonly called "LPDP Jakarta" after the national LPDP education endowment fund it partners with, would send Jakarta students abroad for higher education, according to the city's official news portal, Beritajakarta.

The reaffirmation came three days after the Jakarta City Council's Commission E, which oversees education, asked the provincial government to postpone the program and redirect its budget toward fixing damaged schools and expanding free private-school quotas, commission chair M. Subki said, according to CNN Indonesia.

Pramono had responded Aug. 19 that school repairs, including at two elementary schools the council flagged, would be funded separately through a city fee developers pay for extra building density, with work starting next month. He said that the repair budget is already larger than what the council proposed. "But for LPDP, it will still be carried out," he said at the time.

The city's Education Department has drafted a roughly Rp99.9 billion budget for the program in its 2027 spending plan and is projecting about 100 recipients, split between 70 master's and 30 doctoral students, studying in 11 countries chosen to match Jakarta's development needs, department head Nahdiana told the city council in July, according to Detik.

Rather than build a standalone Jakarta-run institution, which Pramono has said would take too long to set up, the city is partnering directly with the national LPDP under the Finance Ministry. It is the first such partnership between a provincial government and LPDP's central office, Nahdiana told Kompas.