Lessons from Effective Poverty Alleviation in Indonesia: the Role of Women Empowerment and Community Participation

Many literatures suggest that eliminating poverty especially in less developed and developing countries is strongly correlated with many factors such as household’s human capital endowment, its accessibility to basic services and sources of funding. This study puts special attention to spouse (women) as the key agent in household poverty eradication. It is hypothesized that women’s human capital directly determines household’s ability in escaping poverty through its own efforts as well as through its ability to better access and utilize resources. A Multinomial Logit Analysis using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS5) 2014 is utilized to capture the determinants of household poverty status. The dependent variables are household poverty status 2014, i.e. “poor and near poor”, “vulnerable” or “non-poor”. Our main estimator is Spouse Education as proxy of Women Human Capital. The model is controlled by variables representing household socioeconomic characteristics, district’s economic characteristics, poverty related government programs, community participation and community facilities. By performing interaction between women human capital level with community participation variable expected to bring household out of poverty. It is found that women’s human capital and its interaction with community participation has increased the probability of household’s in escaping poverty. Several policy implications related to women human capital improvement and empowerment together with poverty alleviation program follow.