Poverty in Indonesia: Government Targets Poverty Rate of 9.5% in 2015

The minister said that in recent years coordination between the central and regional governments has been good and thus resulted in a decline of absolute poverty from 32.5 million in 2009 to 28.3 million in 2014.

Once poverty has been reduced then the next step is to improve the quality of Indonesia’s human resources in order to become an advanced economy or developed country.  

However, although in recent years Indonesian poverty numbers have shown a steady downward trend, it is assumed that the continuation of this downward trend will slow as most of the Indonesians that rose out of poverty in recent years, were those that lived just below the poverty line. This means that it took less effort to push them out of poverty. But as this group is slowly narrowing in number, it is now the bottom base of Indonesia's poverty that needs to be alleviated. This will be more complicated and thus results in slowing rates of poverty reduction. Therefore, the government target of lowering the nation's poverty rate to between 9 and 10 percent is probably too optimistic.

Indonesian Poverty Statistics:

	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Relative Poverty (% of population)	16.0	17.8	16.6	15.4	14.2	13.3	12.5	11.7	11.5
Absolute Poverty (in millions)	35	39	37	35	33	31	30	29	29
Gini Coefficient/ Gini Ratio	0.36	-	0.35	0.35	0.37	0.38	0.41	0.41	0.41

^{Sources: World Bank and Statistics Indonesia}

Cluster I; involves Healthcare provided by the Social Security Agency (BPJS) which targets to support approximately 86.4 million people, the Family Hope Program (Program Keluarga Harapan) which supports about three million Indonesian households, Poor Students Assistance (Bantuan Siswa Miskin) which supports 8.2 million students for domestic lower education, and Rice for the Poor (Raskin) which provides rice to poor households.

Cluster II; the National Program for Community Empowerment (Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat, PNPM) is integrated up to the district and village level. This program manages funds that flow to the villages.

Cluster III; People's Business Credit (KUR) provides loans to entrepreneurs.

Cluster IV; involves the development and empowerment of 2000 fishermen as well as a cheap and efficient electricity program.

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