Voices Of The Poor : Making Services Work For The Poor In Indonesia

This paper, Making services work for the poor in Indonesia, aims to provide analytical support for the Indonesian Government's efforts to improve access to and quality of basic services for the poor in the wake of the decentralization of the delivery of most government services to the district level in 2001. The report tries to understand what constraints the poor face, and the rationale for choices made by the rural and urban poor with respect to basic health, education, water supply and sanitation services that they need. The report also describes policy recommendations to improve service delivery for the poor on the basis of this analysis, and suggestions from the poor and service providers that could help improve accountability and strengthen relationships among clients, service providers, and policy makers. This study focused on eight types of key services: antenatal services, childbirth assistance, curative services for 0 to 2 month old infants, curative services for >2 months to 5 year old children, primary schooling, transition to secondary schooling, clean water services, sanitation facilities (excreta disposal). These services are important elements in reaching the Millennium Development Goals. High malnutrition, maternal and infant mortality, and low education can be directly traced back to failings in these services. By participating in the delivery of services and pressuring policy makers and service providers, the poor have the potential to improve the quality of services they receive. The study explored to what extent the poor do this and whether they deem their efforts to be effective. The study also sought their views on how they can draw policymakers' attention towards the aspirations of the poor and how to improve the accountability of the service providers to serve poor consumers. This study was designed to take a fresh look at the hypothesis, which has been driving policy in Indonesia, that the policy response in Indonesia to lack of utilization of basic services by the poor, or disappointing service outcomes, has been to use targeted price subsidies for public service provision, such as the health card and scholarships programs and to generate suggestions for alternative policies that are more directly related to the constraints the poor face. The report puts forth a series of recommendations for general and specific policy actions and strategies to improve service delivery to the poor. They are drawn from the specific observations, complaints and assessments made by the poor at all eight sites. Based on personal, real-life experiences, these suggestions offer unique insights into the ways poor women and men poor believe services could be improved and form a complementary list of actions to be used along with findings from the quantitative analysis in the main report.