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.