Menko Muhaimin: Empowerment Builds Community Self-Reliance

Jakarta (ANTARA) - Coordinating Minister for Community Empowerment Abdul Muhaimin Iskandar said that, in the first two years of President Prabowo Subianto and Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming Raka’s administration, community empowerment efforts had changed the approach to poverty alleviation from providing assistance to building self-reliance.

“Over these two years, we have promoted and established a new paradigm. Its slogan is ‘Social Assistance for a While, Empowered for Life’. This means social assistance recipients must receive ongoing capacity-building so they can move up and become economic actors,” Muhaimin said in a statement issued in Jakarta on Tuesday.

Speaking at the Perintis Berdaya Connect (PBC) event at Bandung Creative Hub in Bandung, West Java, he said that the past two years of strengthening community empowerment had been directed towards changing the approach to poverty alleviation.

He said social assistance was still needed to protect vulnerable people. However, it should be accompanied by sustained empowerment so that people have the skills, opportunities and access to improve their living standards.

The approach is expected to help more social assistance recipients become productive economic actors.

Muhaimin added that empowerment could not be achieved through training alone. The government needed to strengthen the entire business-development process, from improving product quality and increasing entrepreneurs’ capacity to opening up wider market access, including to global markets.

“Empowerment means improving things from the upstream stage and the initial product, through capacity-building, right up to access to global markets,” Muhaimin said.

Over the past two years, these efforts have also focused on improving regulations and strengthening collaboration among stakeholders. The aim is to better connect support for communities and businesses, from skills development to product improvement and expanded marketing.

Collaboration is also being strengthened to help micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) remain viable and grow amid various business challenges.

“Over these two years, we have begun to improve regulations and strengthen and refine collaboration. Thankfully, MSMEs are now growing, and efforts are being made to help them remain in business,” Muhaimin said.