Bappenas: Social Assistance Program Needs To Be Focused On Being More Productive

JAKARTA - Deputy for Economic Affairs of the Ministry of National Development Planning/National Development Planning Agency (PPN/Bappenas) Amalia Adininggar Widyasanti said that the distribution of social assistance (bansos) needs to be focused on being more productive.

"The various social assistance that are currently running well, of course, can be further improved to focus more on more productive assistance," he said in Jakarta, quoted from Antara, Saturday, August 3.

He said these efforts were needed so that the benefits of the assistance could be felt by the recipients for a longer time.

That way, his party hopes that the social assistance provided can encourage the poor and vulnerable to be more productive.

As one of the impacts of providing social assistance, Amalia said that the extreme poverty rate in Indonesia had reached 0.8 percent as of March 2024, according to the government's target, which was 0-1 percent by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate in Indonesia as of March fell to 9.03 percent. Even so, he stated that the reduction in the poverty rate still needed to be accelerated.

"Bappenas continues to evaluate existing social assistance programs and the process of improvement in the future will certainly continue to be carried out," he said.

In addition to more productive social assistance, Amalia said that the community also needs quality employment in order to increase employment so as to reduce the unemployment and poverty rate.

He said that the absorption of labor in Indonesia is relatively good and can reduce the level of open unemployment, but the proportion of informal labor still dominates, even though what Indonesia needs in the future is an increase in productivity.

"One of the increased productivity must be supported by labor productivity in addition to the total factor productivity that will reflect Indonesia's overall economic productivity," he added.