Government to launch drive to reduce poverty rate

Government to launch drive to reduce poverty rate

Debbie A. Lubis, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government said on Monday that it was seeking to raise some
8.3 million people from poverty by 2004 through a national
program carried out by the Committee for Poverty Eradication
(KPK).

Currently there are 37.1 million poor people, representing
18.95 percent of the country's population. Most of them are
families whose breadwinners did not graduate from elementary
school and work casually in agriculture or industry.

The committee is overseen by the Coordinating Minister for
People's Welfare and will work based on the Poverty Reduction
Strategy Paper (PRSP), aimed at increasing the income of the poor
and reducing their daily expenses.

"The committee will provide financial aid to each province
based on its poverty ratio while the programs are designed to
meet the needs of the poor.

"This makes the committee more focused and efficient in
helping the poor because we don't want leakage anymore," Deputy
Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare in charge of poverty
alleviation Djoharis Lubis told The Jakarta Post.

He was speaking on the sidelines of a coordination meeting on
the formulation of PRSP organized by his office.

The committee also involved in its programs all stakeholders
-- non-governmental organizations (NGOs), donor country
representatives, provincial administrations, businesspeople,
scholars, and social institutions.

Djoharis said the programs would include temporary provision
of food, scholarships and health services.

He added that the committee would cooperate with the central
bank to provide soft loans at low interest for poor people and
cooperatives to create their own small enterprises or to invest
in agriculture, trading and services.

The paper says that the poverty eradication program could be
considered a success if the poor had access to decent clothing,
food, health facilities, education, clean water, good nutrition
and housing.

The program would also be successful if the poor could
generate appropriate income and obtain access to technology to
improve their business prospects.

Separately, deputy State Minister of National Development
Planning (Bappenas) for regional autonomy and development Bambang
Bintoro Soedjito said that essentially, PRSP was not that
different from the national poverty eradication program carried
out by H.S. Dillon during the tenure of former president
Abdurrahman Wahid.

"Bappenas originally prepared the poverty policy based on
Dillon's work and the World Bank also has its own. So I told the
Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) that the government had
already made concrete efforts and there was no need to draw up
the PRSP from scratch," he said to the Post.

The establishment of the strategy paper is one of CGI's
conditions for its financial assistance to Indonesia.

Bambang said that the committee had met all ministries that
claimed to have been using this year's Rp 17 trillion fund for
poverty alleviation programs.

"It is clear that they have a political interest in supporting
the Cabinet. I told the donors, the government has political
commitment and good will, so why don't you (CGI) just apply the
existing program instead of producing a new paper?" he said.

Bambang said that he had asked the donors and other
stakeholders to monitor the programs by collecting systematic
data and reporting any fund mismanagement that happened in the
field.

"All ministries and provincial administrations claim that they
have used the funds wisely. But we do not know for sure whether
the programs reached the poor or not because of poor data," he
said.

Bambang said that only 100 regencies out of 370 regencies
across the country had reported to his office about the poverty
funds used.

"We cannot go directly to poor people and give them funds,
although we want to reduce leakages caused by the bureaucracy. So
we need the poor to act not only as beneficiaries but also as
control agents," he said.

Meanwhile, Pattimura of the International NGO Forum on
Indonesian Development (Infid) suggested that civil society
actively involve itself in the programs to prevent poverty
eradication from becoming project-oriented programs.

"All the current poverty eradication programs are just a waste
of money like the Social Safety Net (JPS) program. Does the big
money really eradicate poverty or serve only as charity?," he
asked.

Infid estimated the potential leakage in the use of the Rp 17
trillion poverty fund to be Rp 9 trillion due to inefficiencies.