The Indonesian government has so far disbursed Rp450 trillion, or around US$28.9 billion, to fund poverty alleviation programs, the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) has informed.
“Observing it, (the total amount of funds) from the Finance Ministry, transfer of funds to regions, allocated budgets for ministries/institutions, the regional budget (APBD) and so on is already more than Rp450 trillion,” TNP2K executive secretary Suprayoga Hadi informed at a seminar on “Monitoring Acceleration Programs for Extreme Poverty Elimination by 2024” here on Thursday.
Hadi said that the government is targeting to eliminate extreme poverty completely by 2024, which is in line with the global plan of ending extreme poverty by 2030.
According to him, the population living in extreme poverty is different from the poor population. Residents who fall in the extreme poverty group are those who have a purchasing power parity (PPP) of below US$1.9, or Rp10,739 per day, or equivalent to Rp322,170 per month.
“Extreme poverty (population) is at the very bottom; even if we want to alleviate extreme poverty, it does not mean that poverty is gone, but at least they can escape from extreme poverty even though there is still poverty,” he said.
Furthermore, he cited a survey from Statistics Indonesia (BPS), which pegged Indonesia’s poor population at 9.54 percent as of March 2022.
Meanwhile, the extreme poverty rate in Indonesia has reached 2.04 percent, or 5.59 million people in 2022, down from the 2021 rate, which was 2.14 percent or 5.8 million people.
“Of the 34 provinces we observe here, there are 20 provinces that have experienced a decrease in extreme poverty, but there are still 14 provinces that have experienced an increase, which means that there is something wrong that we have to correct,” he said.
One of the problems in implementing extreme poverty elimination programs involves the “exclusion error,” which means that extremely poor people do not receive social assistance.
Source: Antara News