VP Ma’ruf Amin Leads Meeting on Extreme Poverty Eradication in Maluku Province

Vice President Ma’ruf Amin leads a coordination meeting to discuss measures against extreme poverty in Maluku province, at the Maluku Governor’s office in Ambon, Wednesday (13/10). (Photo by: Vice Presidential Secretariat)

Vice President Ma’ruf Amin led a coordination meeting to discuss measures against extreme poverty in Maluku province, at the Maluku Governor’s office in Ambon city, Wednesday (13/10).

Five regencies are designated as priority areas for measures against extreme poverty in the province this year, namely the regencies of Central Maluku, Southwest Maluku, Southeast Maluku, Western Southeast Maluku, and East Seram.

“These five regencies were selected based on the extreme poverty index, which was generated from a combination of the percentage of the extreme poor and the number of extreme poor people by regency, sourced from the Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data through the National Socio-Economic Survey in March 2020 as the main reference,” the Vice President said  at the start of the meeting attended by Governor of Maluku and the regents of the five priority regencies.

The Vice President stated that from a budget perspective, the relevant ministries/institutions have an adequate budget to tackle this problem. The fund, among others, is allocated for social protection and community empowerment.

The Vice president also said that the Government has also set aside a budget of Rp500 trillion, not including budgets whose funds are sourced from the provincial and regency budgets. With the prepared large budget, he asked that all programs to eradicate extreme poverty devised by the Central Government as well as the regional governments must immediately converge and be on target.

The intended convergence, he said, is an effort to ensure that all extreme poverty eradication programs starting from the planning stage until the implementation stage are focused on the same point, both regionally and in terms of the eligible targets of the programs.

He added that the main challenge lies in making the poverty eradication programs convergent and integrated to aim at the same target. Therefore, he asked regional governments to continue to play an active role and innovate to make the acceleration of the program a success, while continuing to converge programs from the Central Government.

On the occasion, the Vice President expressed appreciation to the programs initiated by Maluku Provincial Government to support efforts to eradicate extreme poverty in the province, namely “Rumah Basudara Sejahtera” (Prosperous Brother’s and Sister’s House) and “Manggurebe Bangun Desa” (Village Building Contest) programs. (Vice Presidential Secretariat/UN)  (FI/MUR)