Indonesians in Focus: Muhammad Nehru Sagena

By Barrie | October 18th, 2007 | No Comments

Who determines whether a family is living below the poverty line? If you ask residents of Binuang district in Polewali, West Sulawesi, they will probably reply “the people themselves”. Or, at least that was what Binuang district head Muhammad Nehru Sagena, 37, learned when distributing rice and cash assistance in 2005. At that time, Binuang’s poorest families were often heard to complain they were not receiving any public aid. Nehru found out that some better-off households had been put on the list of recipients of the government’s rice and cash assistance for the poor.

“It was obviously necessary to update the data on the rural population living below the poverty line. The source of the confusion was inaccurate data,” Nehru said.

He organized a meeting involving village heads and community elders in which they decided to apply new thresholds to determine households’ poverty status. They also agreed local people would play a part in establishing new poverty guidelines, as well as supervising data collection and processing.

So, in May 2005 Nehru began collecting data on household income and the number of people living in households. He recruited 116 surveyors, comprising family planning counselors, village midwives, community health workers and community members. Village heads were assigned as supervisors.

The assets of families were used to assess their poverty status.
For example, farmers were classified according to whether they owned their own land or were just farmhands. Also it was important for the surveyors to determine geographic differences in housing, education and medical costs.

The data collected by Nehru and his team was discussed at a meeting attended by village heads and community elders. The surveyors were asked to verify the survey results before they were made public.

According to Central Statistics Agency (BPS) data for 2005, there were 2,301 poor families in Binuang, while Nehru and his team found there were only 2,215 poor families.

“We used the data in the distribution of rice and cash assistance. We are thankful there have been no more complaints,” Nehru said.

He said the decision to involve residents in the data collection process was made on the basis that they knew more about the situation in the field than the statistics agency.

Another reason, he said, was that the poverty threshold needed to reflect “real conditions” like the cost of goods and services.
Nehru said the survey was also used to locate residents who did not have ID cards or birth certificates, as well as children who were not attending school.

The data will be useful for the Polman regency administration in implementing the central government’s nine-year compulsory schooling program.

The data base is being housed in the subdistrict and regency administration offices.

To keep the information up to date, any births or deaths in the subdistrict are to be immediately reported to the administration.
It took Nehru and his team six months to collect the data and a further six months to process it. The Rp 106 million (US$11,500) project was funded by the local administration and the community.

“In fact, the entire process should not have taken more than six months,” Nehru said, explaining the surveyors had come up against resistance from families who had illegally been claiming government assistance.

Nehru’s data collection method has been noted by both the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Decentralization Support Facility for Eastern Indonesia (Sorei).

The two agencies say community-based data collection is a good way of producing accurate data for use in poverty eradication and education programs.

Aside from extending technical assistance, these two institutions helped publish the results and method of data collection used by Nehru and his team in a book titled Poverty from the Community’s Viewpoint, Lesson from Binuang.

The book is expected to serve as a reference for the government in determining the poverty status of households nationwide.

“Pak Nehru’s method of data collection is a way of dealing with social problems like school dropouts,” said Purwanta Iskandar, the chief field officer of UNICEF Makassar, on the sidelines of the book launch.

Andi Hajramurni