Eradicating poverty through the community in Indonesia

Abstract

Eradicating poverty is one of the major concerns for the Government of Indonesia, especially after the failure due to the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Family Welfare Program (locally known as Program Keluarga Harapan) is a conditional cash transfer that the Government of Indonesia had implemented in the mid of 2007 to try to reduce poverty in Indonesia. The nature of the program is to help the community of which the program is addressed to, not only to escape poverty but also to increase the quality of their life, therefore this program tries to engage the community to ensure the success of the program. Using Development Communication (DevComm) and the Participatory Development Communication (PDC), the research aims to see how the different implementation of PDCs steps in the program had affected the program during its pilot period and also to see how PDC could help the program to be better. The research had found that not all the steps in PDC were found during the pilot program, and shows that the program was not as fruitful as was expected. In conclusion, many of the findings during the research shows that the program had overlooked the communication aspect of the program, therefore during the pilot, the program was not very successful in terms of engaging with the community as it had intended.