How Does Community Development Tackle Poverty in the Globalised but Poor Village?
This paper explores the situation of poverty in Indonesia and analyses community development to eradicate poverty in Indonesia.
Community development has been proposed as a way of overcoming the problem of poverty in many countries. As a form of social intervention, it is particularly suitable for less developed countries like Indonesia, where building a civil society is a crucial issue. Compared to other method like casework, which is characterized more by western values (such as individualization), community development is more appropriate due to the size of the problem of poverty and the more communitarian cultural tradition.
The research study, conducted in a poor village in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, finds that massive logging for global markets has affected the local people’s lives. Those people who previously relied primarily on natural resources and forestry products, have lost their income significantly. Therefore a community development project has sought to empower the community and to focus more on changing the community’s source of income. Farming becomes an alternative. However, this involves huge changes. This is a stage of societal development which is more “advanced” than hunting, the previous stage of this community. The changes include not only kind of work, but also values, culture, ethos and way of life. Local, national and global networking, entrepreneurship and marketing also need to be developed. Furthermore, it appears that the social workers regard the poor as homogeneous, whereas they are not. A group called “the poorest of the poor” have been left behind. This practice of applying “one recipe for all” has affected the program effectiveness for poverty alleviation particularly, and civil society building generally. Social work should be sensitive to these issues, including local and global factors. With an understanding of those factors, social work can make a greater contribution to building civil society.