Poverty Targeting in Indonesia: Programs, Problems and Lessons Learned

This paper presents a discussion on some poverty alleviation programs that are specifically targeted to the poor. The programs covered in this paper are: Inpres Desa Tertinggal (IDT), Padat Karya (Employment), Food Security, Education and Health component of the post-crisis Social Safety Net package. Brief assessments of the programs show that the targeting of poverty alleviation programs in Indonesia has been a difficult and frustrating process for cen-tral government planners attempting to allocate scarce budgetary resources as efficiently and effectively as possible. Although poor families did benefit to a certain degree, all the pro-grams that we have considered have suffered from two common problems: under-coverage and leakage. The paper concludes that the effectiveness of various poverty-targeted program in Indonesia are determined by, among other things, the type of targeting, administrative ca-pacity, program design and publicity, and the quality of monitoring.