Yusuf Kalla, the Coordinating Minister for Social Welfare admitted that the Indonesian government certainly will fail to reduce poverty level to 14 percent in 2004 (Kompas, 06/19). It is now predicted that government can only reduce the poverty level to 16 or 17 percent. Three percent variation would represent around 6 million people who are failed to improve their living condition.

Kalla blamed the slow economy growth and recovery in the last four years as the main culprit of the failure. Slow economy growth has resulted in a low capacity of national economy to provide more job opportunities to the poor. In spite of Kalla’s openness to publicly announce this failure – an attitude that should be appreciated -, his statement however can be perceived as a blaming game, pointing the finger at his colleagues in Cabinet’s economy team for this failure.

While our economy growth has not been as high as we expected, is it the primary reason for our failure to reduce poverty?

Kalla’s statement represents the government’s policies that tend to put too much emphasis on the economic sector as strategy and solution to reduce poverty. As a Minister of Social Welfare – supposedly understands and views poverty beyond economic dimension, Kalla apparently is falling into the trap of the old paradigm: That a poverty reduction strategy is centered on the economy.

Traditional view of poverty that defines poverty as “deficit” primarily material and economic deprivation – both are focused on economic aspect - has been abandoned long time ago by many development economists and professionals. Since then, poverty has been viewed from a more multi-dimension which includes health and education. J. Friedman, for instance, defines poverty as the lack of access to social power characterized by the legal system biased against the poor; economic system not responsive to human and environmental costs; the poor are marginalized from political process and not part of the civil society.

Robert Chambers defines poverty as an entanglement where the poor are experiencing material poverty, physical weaknesses, isolated from society, vulnerable and powerlessness. Even the World Bank has recognized the multi-dimensional nature of poverty by taking into account factors such as vulnerability, voicelessness and powerlessness.  Besides tangible factors such as steady income and availability of food, well being includes intangible factors such as peace of mind, good health, belonging to a community, safety, freedom of choice and action and dependable livelihood.

It is easy to blame the economy growth for our failures in poverty reduction. And it is easy to extend the scapegoat as we could also blame regional economy crumple because of Iraq war and SARS. Eventually, nobody is accountable for it.

Surely, the economic team in the cabinet must also be held responsible for this failure. However, by understanding the multidimensional nature and root causes of poverty, there are other ways that government should do - but have not done or not done enough - beyond economic intervention so that the efforts become more successful in reducing poverty. These are the areas where the Ministries under Kalla’s coordination that must be held accountable. 

Rather than blaming the slow economy growth, Mr. Kalla should have reported to the public how effective the Ministers and Departments under his coordination in addressing social and development issues. For examples, how are their performances in preventing and addressing social (religious and ethnic) conflicts in the country; putting the poor in the center of development and economic policies; dealing with growing problems of global diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB; mitigating and coping with natural disasters frequently occurred in the country; investing enough resources into child development (health and education) for our long-term survival as a nation; assuring rights of our children met by the government and other stakeholders; empowering local communities to participate in decision making through local legislations and decentralization, etc.  

The above social and development issues are not only main barriers for poverty reduction -- that unfortunately have not been addressed effectively by our government – but also they contribute in pulling large population of the subsistence groups down under poverty line.

Poverty reduction is a total football game. If each sector failed to define their specific roles in which they should be accountable for, then the poverty reduction effort would fail and everybody easily blame other players or get away from their responsibility. And it seems this is our case!

Interestingly, media and the public hardly responded to Kalla’s report. It’s really sad that in the reformasi era, poverty and the poor are no longer the top priority.

*) Trihadi Saptoadi is Executive Director of an International NGO and  currently working in Nepal.