Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Community Development (AMCA 2018)

These past days have reconnoitered the urgency of the in-depth study on community development, and thus it emerges as a crucial issue. It is evident that all countries, both developed and developing ones, are striving their best through incessant endeavors aiming for developing and improving the welfare of their communities. Departing from the above concern, this conference is held as a forum for experts and scholars in ASEAN to share best practices and insights for the purpose of developing ASEAN communities, considering the widely varying conditions—education, social, economy, and others—across the regions.

What is worth revealing is that ASEAN countries are currently facing intricating and complicated social problems. The so-called highly varied socio-economic, educational, socio-geographic, and cultural conditions in this region have imposed the government as well as ASEAN communities with huge challenges to solve. ASEAN is earnestly a unity; as per 2016, ASEAN is not a mere organization of the countries in the region, but as a community with its torch-like motto “one vision, one identity, one community”. Researchers and academicians are to play their great role and lend unrelenting support in solving and dynamically building ASEAN society.

The Association of Muslim Community in ASEAN (AMCA), to arrive at the intended goal elaborated earlier, annually organizes conferences on community development. This year, the 5th conference is hosted by University of the Philippines, organized by AMCA in collaboration with University of Muhammadiyah Malang (UMM) Indonesia, Guro Formation Forum (GFF), and Jose Rizal University, The Philippines. It was held in University of Philippines, 18-19 of July 2018. On behalf of AMCA, therefore, we would like to deliver our appreciation and express our prodigious gratitude to all of our partners for facilitating and making this event successful. There were 274 participants attended the conference and 199 papers were selected to publish. Before they were published, 3 (three) reviewers were assigned to review each paper. First, each reviewer reviewed the paper in terms of content and language use. Second, the rejected paper was then sent back to the author, and the accepted paper with minor revision was also sent back to the author to revise.

This community development conference has redounded at least three benefits. First, it evokes the sensitivity of ASEAN experts and scholars to spotlight the realities and problems happening in this region, impacting the population of over 650 million. Secondly, it increasingly integrates the experts and scholars to carry out their social duties in solving social problems in the region. Thirdly, now that academic works have been continuously done on scientific bases, this dialogue forum is deemed necessary to achieve progressive changes for people in this region in particular. This precious event is expected to yield best practices in the development of science and social policies with strong emphasis on the improvement the quality of humanity in the ASEAN region.

Latipun, Ph.D.
Secretary General of AMCA