Poverty in Indonesia

          Indonesia still has a big problem beside corruption. And it called: poverty. There’re many people who live in marginal condition. They live with minimum service from the government because they have less money to take their best services. In general, poverty means that people have economic inability to fill their basic needs. It can be measured from their expulsion (Strategic Data of Statistics Indonesia, 2011). But another source is told that poverty not only about economic’ problem, but it also being a multidimensional problem.

            This paragraph will tell you that poverty is multidimensional problem. First problem is inability to fill the human’s basic needs. In this problem, people can’t get the best of their own needs. Usually, it’s followed by nutrition problem. Then, years over years it blossoms out, being healthy, education, and other problems. Like domino effect in USA, but maybe it’s more complex and needs to repair soon. Second problem is too many demography loads. The people, who live under poverty line, usually have more children than the others. Definitely, they have to pay bigger than normal people, but it prevails just in basic needs.

            And government has been surveying this phenomenon in Indonesia since 1984. They used method “Basic Needs Approach” to get the data. The poverty in Indonesia is given by the Poverty Line, Poverty Gap Index and Poverty Severity Index. It’s an example about the newest poverty’s data:

Year	Poverty Line		Poor People
	Urban (rupiahs)	Rural (rupiahs)	Urban (millions)	Rural (millions)
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011	187 942 204 896 222 123 232 989 253 016	146 837 161 831 179 835 192 354 213 395	13,56 12,77 11,91 11,10 11,05	23,61 22,19 20,62 19,93 18,97

(Source : Statistical Yearbook of Indonesia, Statistic Indonesia)

            From the table, we know that every year, government success to decrease the poverty in Indonesia. Many of government’s programs to poor people has released since 2005, such as Gakin Card (Poor Family Card), Free LPG, Free Basic Needs, and the others. Beside the program, there’re many factors which influence the decreasing number of poverty; such as during March 2010-March 2011 period, Indonesia has low inflation, the average salary of daily worker increases around 7,14 %, and the farmers also have an increasing salary.

            It’s a fun fact that we know. And also, the government needs us as Indonesia’s citizen to help them decreasing poverty in Indonesia. So, many years again, Indonesia can be free without poverty and being the best country in the world.

(Source : Statistics Indonesia, 2011)