Urban villages: Perspectives and experiences of migrants and their families on moving from villages to cities in Indonesia

Abstraksi

Indonesia’s cities are growing at a faster rate (4.1%/year) than those in other Asian countries. By 2025 it is expected that 68% of the Indonesian population will be living in cities. However, Indonesia is not gaining the same increases in economic growth through urbanization that some of its neighbours. While Indonesia is gaining around 4% GDP growth for every 1% of urbanization, India is gaining 13%, China 10%, and Thailand 7% (the World Bank, 2016). There is also evidence that Indonesia’s urbanisation is not helping bridge the country’s rich-poor gap. In fact, in the past two decades, the gap between the richest Indonesians and the poorest has grown faster than in any other country in Southeast Asia (Oxfam, 2017). Meanwhile, poverty reduction programmes and policies in Indonesia have typically been geared towards rural communities. Like rural poverty, urban poverty rates have not decreased much in the past few years after large decreases from 2006 to 2011 (Indonesia Investment, 2017). Inequality is also higher in urban than in rural areas and has been rising more rapidly in cities. Given this and Indonesia's rapid urbanisation, designing policies to increase economic growth in equitable and sustainable ways that will also reduce poverty and inequality requires a better understanding of the increasingly urban nature of poverty and economic mobility. This qualitative study was carried out from November to December 2017 and was commissioned by The World Bank. The objective of this study was to provide people-centred insights to feed into the current analytical project to help the Government of Indonesia better understand the process of urbanization in Indonesia. This project aims to provide a better understanding of a) the nature of urbanization, b) macro-level trends in rural-urban migration and the opportunities, barriers and consequences of migration, c) the degree and determinants of economic mobility, d) the economic and non-economic (e.g. social and geographic) dimensions of urban poverty, and e) policy lessons that can be drawn from overseas and Indonesian experiences. An improved understanding of these processes will enable the Government of Indonesia (GoI) to design better policies which can, in turn, drive economic growth and reduce poverty. This study took place in ten locations; five urban and five rural. The urban locations were identified within the cities of Jakarta, Medan, Tangerang, and Makassar and included slum and non-slum areas, central and periphery areas, areas with many long-term migrants and those with short-term migrants. These urban locations were chosen to ensure the study covers patterns of migration in the western, central, and eastern regions of Indonesia and the specific cities selected were those with the highest migration rates based on various previous surveys. The rural locations were purposely identified after the immersion in the urban areas as those areas where migrants met in the urban areas originated from. Further criteria were applied in selecting rural locations to include villages with a large proportion of households with one or more current internal migrants, both those with relatively easy access to the city and those requiring longer journeys and with a range of short term and long term migrants. Anonymised mobile network data analysis undertaken by Pulse Lab Jakarta was also used as a criterion for selection. The selected rural villages were located in Cirebon, Pemalang, Samosir, Jeneponto, and Manggarai Timur districts. Based on conversations with migrants, six distinctive types of migrants emerged. These distinctions are based on a combination of (i) the nature of their work, (ii) motivations to migrate, and (iii) length of residence. Four types work largely within the informal sector and comprise casual workers which are further segmented as (i) long stay, (ii) commuter (stay weeks) and (iii) ‘follow the money’ who move frequently for work as well as the self-employed. Two types of migrant are situated in the formal sector; waged and salaried, which also includes those migrating for higher education for the purposes of getting salaried work. The team talked with over 300 migrant workers of whom 192 were informal sector workers and 121 were in the formal sector.