I

magine yourself as a young woman in a rural village. With no education, no job opportunities, no money to start up a business, what would you do?

Many young women from Grobogan regency, Central Java, faced this dilemma, traveling to big cities — Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, and Semarang — to work as housemaids, but dealt with pressure and anxiety. Some were led astray and ended up working as prostitutes.

Parents who want to keep their young daughters away from the perilous streets of those big cities usually order their daughters to just stay at home, leaving them unemployed and contributing nothing to their families’ impoverished circumstances.

Being married off at a young age is often deemed the best option for women like this. Eventually, there is no “bright future” these young women or in turn, their children, as the vicious poverty cycle rolls on.

This is the problem that non-profit organizations Indonesia Business Links (IBL), Plan Indonesia, Koperasi Mitra Dhuafa, the Community for Economic and Social Development Study (PERSEPSI) and the Purbadanarta Foundation are trying to solve by establishing the Youth Economic Empowerment (YEE) scheme, a program that provides training and microcredit to young people in Grobogan regency — mainly women — so they can find or establish sustainable employment.

The choice of Grobogan as the initial implementation area for the YEE program was due to the results of a study by Plan Indonesia, which identified Grobogan as one of the poorest regencies in Indonesia. The most up-to-date information on Grobogan came from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) in 2009, which showed that 18.67% citizens in the regency still lived in poverty – way above the national average of 14.15% in that year.

According to Rio Sandi, the YEE’s program manager, the three-year program began in January 2011 and, until now, it had given microcredit loans to 5,200 low-income youths from small villages in Grobogan, as well as having provided business mentoring trainings to 1,200 young people.

Rio said the program has proven crucial, especially in changing the mindset among the less-educated women who lived in rural areas and who previously chose to work as housemaids in big cities instead of establishing small businesses.

“Many of the young women we met [in Grobogan’s villages] were introverts. Their parents taught them to stay at home and take care of the household. If they work at all, they merely work as housemaids. We try to enlighten them, to change their mindsets,” he said.

Rio said that the women were the organization’s major target for the training since they could spread their new perspective to their children. Women, he argued, also tended to be more influential, since they were more engaged in various informal conversations in the society.

Sunardi, the head of one of the villages in Grobogan, who also attended the YEE press conference, told The Jakarta Post that he hoped that the YEE program would provide women in his village with the requisite skills to establish businesses, or work in a decent industry.

Sunardi said that most of the young women in his village only aspired to become housemaids in large cities, with some of them ending up as prostitutes.

“However, the tangible results [of the YEE scheme] are yet to be seen, as the program’s focus takes a long-term view,” Sunardi added.

The high rate of unemployment among the young have become serious headache for Indonesian policymakers. According to data from the National Development Planning Ministry, around 8.02 million Indonesians are currently unemployed, of which around 60% are between the ages of 15 and 24.

Rahma Iriyanti, the director for Labor and Employment Development at the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) said the YEE program was crucial to helping solve various problems in society, especially in rural areas, many of which are caused by rising unemployment among the younger generation.

“This program is imperative to improving the [business] competitiveness of Indonesia’s youth,” Rahma said. (sat)