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ocial entrepreneurship is the central idea that Prasetiya Mulya Business School has been trying to instill among its students and the residents of Babakan Sukaluyu village, Cianjur, West Java, this year.

About 170 students of the business school stayed at a local residents’ house for a whole month, from Jan. 24 to Feb. 24, where they cooperated with one another in working on a social business project called the 2012 community development program.

“We aim to empower the villagers by making them more independent and improving their quality of life through entrepreneurship,” said Burhan Primanintyo, one of Prasetiya Mulya’s lecturers responsible for the project, on Saturday.

The students were grouped into units comprising seven to eight members each. Each unit was tasked with creating a business with a respective local resident, who were referred to as “partners”, many of whom were housewives.

The kinds of business that they focused on were aimed at taking advantage of existing potential. For example, some of the partners could already make cassava chip snacks, sponge cake, accessories and clothes.

The village, which is located 17 kilometers away from Cianjur, faces an uncertain climate situation that is significantly affecting the locals’ livelihoods, which for the most part is dependent on agriculture.

Djalaludin, the village head, said that since 2007, the village had produced about 10 tons of cassava per hectare but now it could only produce about 5 tons per hectare.

“The locals have started to change their jobs from farmer and herder to merchants, thanks to the program,” he said.

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), in September 2011 there were 29.89 million people in Indonesia living under the poverty line, mostly in rural areas.

Burhan said that the main challenge of promoting small business in rural areas, such as in Cianjur, was to know how to market the products.

He added that this year the business units were mainly marketing their products to their neighborhood.

One of the students, Handoyo Widodo, said that he was excited about the program.

“We conducted research right away with our partner and found that our partner could make cheese stick snacks. We came up with the idea to flavor the cheese sticks with hot pepper and other flavors,” he told The Jakarta Post.