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CampusNet – Currently, Indonesia is recorded as the country with the second highest poverty problems rate in ASEAN. According to the World Bank report, it is stated that more than 60 percent of Indonesia’s population lives below the global poverty line.
As a result, this condition has increasingly raised concerns for many parties regarding the effectiveness of poverty alleviation policies that have been implemented by the government.
Cash Assistance is Only a Temporary Solution
The existence of this problem has drawn a response from the Sociology Expert of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Airlangga University, Prof. Dr. Bagong Suyanto, who said that charitable approaches such as the Family Hope Program (PKH) and Non-Cash Food Assistance (BPNT) are not sufficient to provide long-term impacts on the independence of the poor.
“As long as the programs developed by the government are charitable, such as cash assistance and the like, poverty reduction efforts will not be effective. This program only prolongs life, not empowering the poor to be independent,” said Prof. Bagong, reported from the official Unair website, Wednesday, (28/5/2025).
Poverty Problems Need a Better Empowerment Model
For him, there is a program substance that is much more important than the name or form of assistance. Bagong gave an example of many program nomenclatures that seemed to care about the poor, but lacked concrete empowerment content.
To that end, he reminded that the social structure and low financial literacy of the community would be important factors related to the problem. However, this issue is often ignored in policy formulation.
In the end, Prof. Bagong highlighted about poverty problems, that there is a multidimensional problem that cannot be solved with an economic approach alone. There are around 20 percent of poverty related to economic factors.
Then, the next problem concerns social aspects, education, information to structural discrimination.
“The approach to poverty alleviation should not be solely economic. There must be a systematic policy that touches on social aspects, education and community empowerment structurally,” he said.
Furthermore, Prof. Bagong said that the government should build economic resilience from the bottom up, and encourage the birth of more resilient and efficient micro-entrepreneurs.
“If we only focus on the growth of large businesses, then the poor are forced to compete with the upper middle class, that is not fair,” concluded the Professor of Sociology at FISIP Unair closing his statement.
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