Since 2003, the Freedom Institute awards two distinguished countrymen and women for their extraordinary achievements in the social sciences and literature. Past recipients of
Penghargaan Achmad Bakrie include Ignas Kleden, the late Nurcholish Madjid, Sartono Kartodirdjo, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Goenawan Mohamad, and Budi Darma. In 2005, we expanded the prize to cover achievements in medical services. The Bakrie family sponsors these awards and the prizes of Rp. 100 million for each recipient. We aspire to make these awards the domestic equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Along with these awards, we also present generous scholarships to high-achieving high school students to continue their studies up to the doctoral level. The Freedom Institute believes that these public programs, while important in their own right, also serve as effective forums for reasserting the classical ideas of human progress that we believe our nation should embrace.
Apart from the Achmad Bakrie awards, we also organize
Penghargaan Ahmad Wahib . This award, conferred every other year since 2003, is a special program that we have developed to encourage young writers. This program offers one prize of Rp. 30 million for an essay written on a specific topic. The late Ahmad Wahib was a liberal Muslim intellectual who died at a young age. We believe that his ideas remain relevant to today's Indonesian youth, and therefore, we encourage them to read his book,
Pergolakan Pemikiran Islam, which we have also republished.
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