Sustainable Livelihood Index: Liberating the poor with contextual indicators and poverty measurement in Indonesia

Abstraksi

Poverty measurement in Indonesia is carried out by BPS and BKKBN. It is important to reflect the poverty outlook based on community perspective that is absent from BKKBN and BPS poverty measurement. Both the poverty measurements of BKKBN and BPS are analyzed in terms of the strength and weakness. By applying SWOT analysis, some notable strength of both BKKBN and BPS are listed. They include accuracy in obtaining numbers of poverty, people who are affected by poverty and the regions that have severe poverty level. The result of BPS particularly can be compared across regions, province and country, while BKKBN can better describe in Indonesia with strong qualitative description. Weaknesses are also noted including the absence of community participation so that the poverty outlook does not necessarily reflect the concept and the condition of the community. In fact, there is a room for improvement by integration of BPS and BKKBN data and promoting subjective measurement even though there is still challenge in terms of the different tendencies between government professionals and the community about poverty. Therefore, a subjective measurement, Sustainable Livelihood Index (SLI), is proposed to measure the poverty and to support the measurement of the government. As a new designed approach, SLI is practically effective as it can measure the poverty based on the livelihood deprivation threshold and community deprivation threshold. This measurement also analyzes the strategy to deal with the poverty and the barriers that entraps the community under the poverty.