Yvette Tanamal

The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

The Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Ministry has discovered a substantial discrepancy between the data it has collected from villages and the data gathered by Statistics Indonesia (BPS), which could possibly affect policy making and rural development.

The deviation of figures was discovered in the census survey, whereby the ministry believes that BPS records are short nearly 100 million village residents. Consequently, figures relating to education, employment and poverty will be affected.

Minister Abdul Halim Iskandar noted that such an inaccuracy could hinder progress toward achieving the Village Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs Desa) and require a new, revamped method of data collection.

Abdul said that inferring from the ministry’s current data collection and information from the civil registry database at the Home Ministry, there is a “big probability” that there are a total of 214 million Indonesians living in villages, a divergence of almost 100 million from the BPS’ figure of 117 million village residents.

“The agency said that 43 percent of all Indonesians live in villages, whereas data collected by the civil registry office derived from citizens’ addresses reveal that the figure is 71 percent,” the minister told The Jakarta Post recently.

Such a discrepancy is significant enough to affect policy making and funding distribution, Abdul noted.

“Village data for Bondowoso [a regency in East Java], for example, has a difference of 400 people when compared with BPS data. It was later found that the village data was accurate. A difference of hundreds can affect policies,” he said.

The villages ministry started collecting its own data in April 2020 during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic to distribute direct cash assistance (BLT) to families living below the poverty line or those who were financially affected by the health crisis.

The data is collected by local volunteers and starts from neighborhood units (RTs) – the lowest level of local administration. The data is verified with village heads, before making its way up to the regency and city administrations.

The method is contrary to the BPS’ top-down method, in which census officers not local to the area are sent to distribute and collect questionnaires filled out by village residents before comparing them with civil registry baseline data.

Read also: Give villages greater role for more effective COVID-19 measures: Watchdog

Abdul argued that its bottom-up approach would prove to be more effective in collecting poverty and education figures.

Since a sense of community in villages is much more prominent than in the cities, locals would be able to more accurately report, verify and cross-check data relevant to them and their neighbors, he said. He added that data updating would also be more seamless if done by village heads and village secretaries, who would be more aware of any recent developments in their area such as deaths, births and migration.

The database, which is expected to be finalized over the next several months, will be useful in helping current and future village administrators to design policies as it will provide streamlined access to the most accurate figures on relevant issues.

It will also be used by the ministry to streamline deliberations at the village level and help in achieving the targets of the SDGs Desa program to eradicate poverty, improve education quality and encourage female participation.

“So far, we have collected the data of 94 million residents. We were able to collect a big sample because we made it clear through the rules that the villages would have full ownership of the data, which gives them agency,” the ministry’s research and development agency head Ivanovich Agusta said.

“Typically, all the questionnaires by the BPS including those about a village’s potential are taken back by the BPS,” he added.

Read also: Villages in Indonesia lack skills to manage development funds

Agusta said that socialization had been one of the biggest challenges the ministry faced so far, as the ministry would need to educate the village residents about how a better database could affect their lives for the better. Since the collection method would be done on a completely voluntary basis, the ministry would need to increase its efforts in convincing villagers to participate.

According to the Home Ministry, a total of 83,381 villages are spread across the country’s 34 provinces, covering over 90 percent of the national territory. Despite this remarkable proportion, villages are often overlooked by the government and are vulnerable to problems such as poverty, hunger, poor education and unemployment.

The BPS was not immediately available for comment.

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