M

embers of House of Representatives renewed their commitment to fighting poverty on Friday by placing it as the top priority on their list for striving to achieve the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The House, which established a working committee on MDGs in March, had reaffirmed that eradicating poverty by 2015 would be at the top of the legislative agenda — a non-negotiable approach to accelerating the MDG progress.

“In order to reduce the poverty rate and accelerate our MDG development programs, we need comprehensive participation from all state institutions,” the chairman of the House working committee on MDGs, Nurhayati Ali Assegaf, said over the weekend.

According to the Central Statistics Agency, the country’s poverty rate stood at 13.3 percent in August 2010, or around 32 million people — a decrease of 0.8 percent from the poverty level of 14.1 percent recorded in 2009.

When the United Nations Millennium Declaration promulgating the MDGs was signed by 192 countries in 2000, Indonesia recorded around 140 million citizens living below the poverty line.

Despite progress, the country nevertheless is still far from meeting the ideal target of reducing its national poverty rate by 1.2 percent per year in order to bring the level down to 8 percent by 2014.

The poverty rate remained relatively high due to rampant disparities in all sectors, including those related to public services, such as education and healthcare, House Speaker Marzuki Alie said.

“Therefore, this problem needs serious and comprehensive management in all sectors, and demands the full attention of the parliament,” he said, adding that new breakthroughs in development projects, especially in remote and underdeveloped areas, were needed to fulfill anti-poverty goals.

“Affirmative action targeting marginalized groups, such as women, children, and indigenous peoples, are key to combating poverty. Therefore, in the case of the parliament, such new breakthroughs can be achieved by aligning legislative programs and budgets directly with the MDGs,” Marzuki said.

He also pointed out that, with little more than five years left, there was an urgent need to strengthen global partnerships for development.

“Therefore, we are assigning the House working committee on MDGs to gather international support, especially from developed countries who have promised to help developing countries meet MDG targets,” Marzuki said.

Democratic Party legislator Nurhayati said the working committee was established to improve legislative participation in the creation of policies aimed at accelerating MDG progress and eventually cut the poverty rate in half.

The committee is comprised of 25 members from the House Inter-parliamentary Cooperation Body, the membership of which is selected from legislators of all House factions and commissions.

“Also, the committee is tasked with, among other things, increasing the House’s monitoring capacity and promoting inter-parliamentary cooperation with international organizations, all of which strive to achieve MDG targets,” Nurhayati added.

The committee had so far conducted MDG-related meetings with a number of ministries and state institutions, such as the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry and the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), she said. (tsy)