Vulnerability to poverty now a fact of life more than half of

Vulnerability to poverty now a fact of life more than half of
all 215 million Indonesians and more than half of all Indonesians
are likely to experience an episode of poverty every three years.

These grim statistics seem to belie the fact that over the
last three decades, the government of Indonesia has undertaken
many initiatives to alleviate poverty through a variety of
policies and programs. These have sought to provide basic needs
such as; food, education, health services, employment,
agricultural assistance, business credit for the poor and
infrastructure assistance for urban slums.

Unfortunately, much of the benefits of these endeavors have
been reversed as a result of the economic crisis of 1997 along
with the social turmoil and natural disasters in recent years. As
a consequence, millions of people have fallen back below the
poverty threshold.

Poverty alleviation efforts by the government have suffered
from limitations that have actually sidelined poor people, such
as; an emphasis on macroeconomic growth, overly centralized
policies, charitable purposes as opposed to empowerment,
regarding people as objects rather than actors, perceiving
poverty only as an economic condition, and unduly generalized
assumptions and attempts to solve the problem.

Accordingly, poverty levels in Indonesia have hardly improved
since their pre-1997 levels.

Meanwhile, many developing country governments in Asia and all
the major development agencies are actively pursuing policies and
strategies for using Information and Communication Technologies
(ICTs) to reduce poverty. Mostly, this involves providing poor
people with shared access to computers and the Internet, but it
can also mean a more creative and pro-poor use of the more
traditional technologies of TV and radio.

The Indonesian government has not yet formulated a coherent
set of policies and strategies for using ICT for reducing the
urgent problem of poverty. It is burdened by a relatively poor
ICT infrastructure, as the figures in the table show.

IndonesiaMalaysiaThailandPhilippines
Computer Ownership Per 100 Inhabitants1.01 12.62.8 1.93
Telephone Lines Per 100 Inhabitants3.11 20.512.68.70
Internet Hosts Per 10,000 Inhabitants1.27 31.111.8 2.54
Internet Users Per 100 Inhabitants1.82 27.36.74.27
Cell Phone Subscribers Per 100 Inhabitants1.73 32.8 12.3 15.9

Many examples of how ICTs can reduce poverty can be observed
from neighboring countries. India, for example, the Asian country
with the most poor people, is a hotbed of experimentation, with
several projects in hundreds of villages affecting tens of
thousands of poor people.

In one project, the Karnataka State government in India has
computerized 20 million land ownership records belonging to 6.7
million farmers. Each record is available online from 177 public
kiosks at an equivalent cost of around Rp 1,700 per record. The
records provide valuable proof of land ownership, which farmers
need in order to secure credit, and the system is so transparent
it has virtually eliminated the corruption of the traditional
village accountants.

The E-Chaupal project in central India operates around 5,000
public information kiosks and is a web-based initiative of the
ITC corporation that serves Soya growers with information on
products and services required in Soya farming. The kiosks assist
in the supply of high quality farm inputs as well as the sale of
Soya products by the villagers. They also provide useful
information on commodity dealerships such as motorcycles and
tractors. The approach to dealing with farmers has revolutionized
agricultural commodity marketing in India through the use of ICT.

In the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island Borneo,
within walking distance of the Indonesian border, the ethnic
minority people of Bario do not yet have a road to the nearest
town, and all travel is by air or foot. Yet they now have access
to the Internet via a public center with a satellite facility and
the two schools in the village have computer laboratories, also
with Internet access.

As a piece of research, the project is demonstrating the high
value that isolated and remote communities place on improved
communications; probably the only means by which a unique culture
and lifestyle can hope to survive into the 21st century.

The Philippine government is operating a pilot poverty
reduction project consisting of Multipurpose Community
Telecenters in rural villages on Mindanao. The project began in
1999, and is democratizing access to information for health,
education, agriculture and rural enterprise development, through
the shared use of ICT facilities.

It has partnered with local non-governmental organizations
(NGO) who work closely with the communities to understand their
information requirements and to mobilize them towards local
development activities that are based on improved access to
information. The outcome is expected to lead to nationwide
implementation involving potentially 44,000 villages.

In northern Thailand, an NGO is operating several ICT
projects, including a local TV station, to assist semi-nomadic,
non-Thai speaking ethnic minorities living in remote villages who
have become impoverished and disenfranchised. The programs use
ICT for e-commerce and eco-tourism, a virtual hill tribe museum,
a missing persons database and a Thai citizenship facility.

Indonesia's use of computers and the Internet is very low
compared to its neighbors. Also, 42 percent of the already low
access to the Internet is from the 4,000 or so Warnet or public
internet kiosks, most of which are profit-oriented and serve the
urban areas, however, most customers only log on to check email,
chat or play games.

Rural access to the Internet, which is where the majority of
poor people live, is virtually non-existent, and many islands and
isolated districts are struggling to achieve even basic
telephony. Despite the size of the country and its problems of
poverty, there are very few examples of the type described above
for putting ICT to work for the tens of millions of poor people.
Why is this?

For its part, the government has yet to get its act together,
both in dealing with the poverty issue and with a national
response to ICTs for poverty reduction. Although in the later
stages of preparation, the national poverty reduction strategy
has yet to place a priority on the use of ICTs. This is a pity,
because at the present rate of improvement there is little hope
of achieving the levels of poverty reduction targeted under the
internationally adopted Millennium Development Goals, which
include halving the incidence of poverty by 2015. We have seen
that while macroeconomic growth is important, it is not the same
thing as poverty reduction. The only hope of accelerating the
pace of poverty reduction is to adopt creative measures and
modern technology, which means learning from international
experience and using ICT.