Why poverty alleviation schemes fail
By Rita A. Widiadana
JAKARTA (JP): Heads of state, bureaucrats, employers and military leaders never starve when poverty grips an authoritarian society. Democracy, by contrast, would spread the penalty of famine to the ruling groups and the political leadership, said l998 Nobel Prize Laureate for Economics Amartya Sen.
Siti Oemijati Djajanegara, a poverty expert from the University of Indonesia's Demographic Institute, shares a similar frame of mind.
The 32-year oppressive leadership of the New Order regime has led the nation into the current social, economic and political turmoil, dragging more than 100 million people below the poverty line.
"Poverty is not caused solely by economic reasons but also by social, cultural and political deprivations as well as misinformation about the real condition of a country and its people," Oemijati said.
During the peachy days of the New Order government led by former president Soeharto, Indonesians thought that they were already prospering because of the country's impressive yet evasive economic development.
People thought the government had done a good job by providing enough food, employment and education, while at the same time, repressing social, political and media openness. It also boasted its success in reducing the number of poor as being only 11 million out of its population of just over 200 million.
"But we should not forget, a lot of data and information was manipulated during the New Order era because of the lack of press and public control," she said.
Many local officials often provided rosy reports in order to please the central bureaucrats. This included the number of the poor in each village of the country's 27 provinces.
"We must raise the question whether 11 million poor families in the New Order period was a valid number or whether the data was collected precisely. I am really in doubt," she conceded.
It is not surprising, she said, with the number of poor having increased tenfold in the present economic disaster, that every institution dealing with poverty eradication is pointing fingers and blaming at each other for not sounding an early alarm in order to take immediate action.
"The word 'action' was hardly heard during that era. The government had a perfect theory on alleviating poverty, but when it came to putting it into real action, those involved in the project preferred to stay away," she said.
She said she was aware that a number of poverty eradication schemes launched by the government were arranged by numerous behind-the-table bureaucrats who rarely conducted field visits.
"Without visiting the targeted villages and getting to know the people, you will have no understanding of the fundamental problems of poverty. And this is what happens with many of our government officials," she said.
Theoretically, all programs dealing with poverty alleviation are perfectly organized at the central level.
However, at the lower layers -- regional and district levels -- the programs have sizable holes and shortcomings in them.
Citing an example, she said, was the government's Village Improvement Programs (IDT), which is aimed at eradicating the number of poor families by providing infrastructure and financial assistance.
"The program emphasizes building facilities to improve the village while ignoring human factors as well as different traditional values adopted by any community," she said.
Intervention can be made to help these unfortunate people only if they know the target people, their habits, their specific needs and the local culture and traditions that surround their lives.
"Would-be helpers have to define very clearly what and why they are going to do before leaping in," she maintained.
In reality, these officials have no idea what the people need most to help them out of their destitution. "They distribute similar kinds of assistance to all targeted villages," she said.
The distribution of fertilizers and agricultural tools would not be effective if they were given to seafaring fishermen's villages. Or, financial aid given to communities living in remote forest areas would mean nothing if it were not accompanied by management help and guidance from officials.
Discrepancies
"Such discrepancies occur in many IDT projects across the country. Not to mention that financial handling of these programs is very vulnerable to corruption because of lack of monitoring and controls," Oemijati warned.
The provision of both financial and technical assistance would be more effective if institutions and officials involved in the projects were willing to work harder to identify, to assist and to monitor the given aid in order to obtain valuable feedback from the targeted villagers.
Oemijati said she obtained valuable knowledge on how to precisely identify the poor and the poorest of the poor by conducting a series of interviews and observations with village chiefs and district and subdistrict heads in a number of poverty- stricken villages across the country.
When she visited an impoverished village in a Central Java town, she asked the village chief how he identified the poorest families in his area.
"Just visit a wedding party. You know the more affluent guests will bring rice, sugar, fruit or other commodities as their wedding gifts and will confidently enter the front door.
"The poor, on the other hand, will immediately enter the back door and offer their services, whether to help cook or wash dishes because they did not have enough money to bring a gift."
In a fishing village in West Java, she was also impressed by the way the fishermen defined poverty. According to them, the poorest man is the one people would not give a loan to or any kind of help.
In one community, a person could not be categorized as poor if he/she belonged to a helpful extended family and a handful of friends who are ready to help this person.
A regional hospital in an East Java town has its own way of defining penniless patients. Besides having a poor certificate (a letter from a village chief stating a patient is poor), doctors and nurses at that hospital identify a patient's living condition by observing his/her visitors and the things they bring for the patient. They also make home visits to each of the poor patients.
"Once, there was a poor patient whose family brought him expensive fruit and a box of Swiss chocolate," they said.
Many people, they said, took advantage of the poor certificate to get free medication or education. They make a fool of the government's good intention to help them. "But, actually, who fools who, when the government doesn't care about monitoring it?" Oemijati asked.
Based on these observations and studies, she came to the conclusion that chronic poverty is not only caused by a food shortage, lack of employment chances and natural hardship, but also by social and mental imperfection.
The signs of poverty are not only physically visible, such as poor-quality houses, but also deal with emotional and mental handicaps. To help the poor, she said, we should know the cause of their problems first. Why and how they are trapped in poverty, and how we can help them overcome it.
"It is such a complicated and immense problem, Indonesia and other underdeveloped countries must deal with consistently and seriously," Oemijati.
Poverty cannot be solved as a single problem. "You certainly cannot solve poverty problems due to the economic crisis without solving social, political and cultural discords currently happening in Indonesia," she said.
On macro levels, the government has done a good job, including the implementation of the Village Improvement Programs covering urban and remote villages in the country's 27 provinces for long- term poverty alleviation programs.
As the country's list of poor rockets to over 100 million, almost half of the country's population, the government has set up social safety net programs, chaired by respected former minister of finance, Mar'ie Muhammad.
"Still, the government must remember that this program will, again, be wasted if it doesn't touch the core problems of poverty," she said.
The implementation of the social safety net programs has, so far, been hampered because of shortages of the latest data and information on the real number of poor.
"How will they be able to provide accurate data if they don't want to improve their easygoing attitude, or if they stay behind their office tables?" she ended.