TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
West Papua one step closer to accurate civil registration
Daud Demi, 31, a resident of Muari Village in South Manokwari, West Papua, has found a new calling as his village’s data-pooling man under the Village Administration and Information System (SAIK) program
Change Size
D
span>Daud Demi, 31, a resident of Muari Village in South Manokwari, West Papua, has found a new calling as his village’s data-pooling man under the Village Administration and Information System (SAIK) program.
“I only graduated elementary school and since then had been working odd jobs to earn a little money to support my family,” Daud told The Jakarta Post in South Manokwari recently. “Now I collect data from my neighbors to help the government make significant decisions to help residents in need.”
Daud was chosen to be his village’s SAIK data collector in May 2017 when Indonesian-Australian partnership, KOMPAK LANDASAN, organized a workshop and training on SAIK.
At that time, they introduced SAIK and a similar program for district level, SAID, as a pilot scheme in Fakfak, Kaimana, South Manokwari, and Sorong in West Papua, and in Asmat, Waropen, Boven Digoel, Lanny Jaya, Jayapura and Nabire in Papua.
Daud, who was chosen because he was among the few who were literate in his village, had to learn how to operate a laptop and afterward how to input residents’ data into SAIK software.
“I needed three months to learn how to operate the laptop,” he said, laughing. “I started by learning how to turn it on and off, then I learned how to operate the applications.”
Later, Daud started to collect data on his neighbors door to door.
“I took note of everything; how many people live in a house, whether they are healthy or they have malaria, their blood types, how many pigs they own, how many cocoa trees they own, how far they go to school, whether there is any pregnant woman in the house or anyone planning to get pregnant, and much more,” he said.
Daud took another three months to input the data on 182 families in the village into the SAIK database, and update the data every three months. Now he proudly sees the positive impact made by the data collection he has labored on.
“We have successfully identified those who are most in need and thus we can allocate the village’s funding to build eight houses for the poorest members of the community. We are planning to build more,” he said.
“We have also identified those who do not own family certificates and ID cards. We invited staff members from the civil registry office to do the paperwork and now they already have the IDs and thus can access subsidies for health and education,” he said.
Heracles Lang, the KOMPAK lead officer in special autonomy (Otsus) funding, said Papua and West Papua were the poorest provinces in Indonesia and they were in dire need of accurate data to help allocate their large development funds.
“There are so many kinds of development funding flowing to Papua and West Papua from the central government, trillions of rupiah of it every year, but it is hard to allocate the money properly because we lack the data,” Heracles said.
According to Heracles, geographical conditions of Papua and West Papua are a major hurdle to collecting data the correct way.
He said SAIK and SAID offered groundbreaking data-gathering methods by presenting more local indicators and recruiting local staff to collect the data, instead of deploying data officials from Jakarta.
“I started by learning how to turn it on and off, then I learned how to operate the applications.”
“For example, in these provinces many wealthy families have houses with dirt floors and wooden walls, but they have many pigs. The central government will only see the state of their houses as indicators, not the number of the pigs,” Heracles said. “With SAIK and SAID, we are able to record such local indicators.”
“To run the program we recruit and train data collectors, two to three people for each village. To become a data collector, they only have to be literate and be willing [to go door to door collecting data],” Ted Weohau, the KOMPAK Implementation director said. Many of the collectors are first computer users like Daud, he said. “Our trainers have to train them from zero but they are fast learners,” he said.
The pilot phase in the four districts of West Papua involves 109 villages, all of which are now able to plan their development independently and maximizing various fund sources.
West Papua Governor Dominggus Mandacan, along with 13 regents and mayors under his administration, signed the agreement to replicate the systems in all regencies in the province on May 28.
“I hope the implementation of SAIK and SAID can help West Papua speed up development and increase its Human Development Index,” Dominggus said in Manokwari after the signing ceremony. “Accurate data will ease the development plans targeting local Papuans using Otsus funds.”
According to Dominggus, West Papua is now running several programs to eradicate poverty and narrow the social gap. One of which is the Village Strategic Development Program, which starting next year will dispense Rp 225 million (US$ 15,776.44) for each village, Rp 150 million for each subdistrict, and Rp 100 million for each district. The funding will be used for training village data collectors, village data mining and village administration improvement. The funding also has to subsidize health care, education and financial improvement for residents in need.
“All of this only can succeed with strong, accurate data,” Dominggus said.
