Vice President Ma'ruf Amin Asks Regional Heads To Ensure Extremely Poor Families Receive Assistance

Vice President Ma'ruf Amin/PHOTO VIA ANTARA

JAKARTA - Vice President Ma'ruf Amin mentioned two challenges to solving extreme poverty in Indonesia, namely ensuring social protection programs and organizing empowerment programs for the extremely poor.

This was conveyed by Vice President Ma'ruf Amin while chairing a meeting on the Acceleration of Extreme Poverty Reduction from the Side of Economic Empowerment via video conference.

"The main issue in accelerating extreme poverty reduction is how to ensure that social protection and empowerment programs can effectively reduce poverty, including extreme poverty", said Vice President Ma'ruf as quoted by Antara, Tuesday, September 28.

To ensure that the two programs are effective, the Vice President said that all line ministries and non-ministerial government agencies (K/L), Regional Governments (Pemda), and related non-governmental parties must ensure that the program is right on target.

"I ask governors and regents to ensure that all extremely poor households in priority areas receive all programs implemented by various ministries/agencies, including maximizing support from local governments and involving non-government parties", said Ma'ruf Amin.

The vice president also asked the Regional Poverty Reduction Coordination Team (TKPKD) at the provincial, district, and city levels to be more active in coordinating to solve extreme poverty in the regions.

With these challenges, the Vice President emphasized that there are no budget constraints to solve extreme poverty in the regions. The vice president said the budget related to poverty alleviation, including extreme poverty, reached IDR 526 trillion in the 2021 fiscal year.

The budget was used for two main activities. First, the budget is used to provide social assistance and subsidies, to reduce the expenditure burden of the extremely poor.

Second, the budget is used for the implementation of empowerment programs to increase productivity to increase the economic capacity of the extremely poor.