Sustainable
livelihoods
|
SD(B) director Sachlan North (right) and project workers (left) with a transmigrant family
Dr. Wahono with the project team |
Susila Dharma (Britain) is working
with Susila Dharma Indonesia to raise the livelihood levels of
impoverished villages in the area north of Palangka Raya in
central Kalimantan. The project is in partnership with
Yayasan Agro Ekonomika, a non-governmental organisation (NGO)
led by Prof. Sayogyo, a Subud member in Bogor, Indonesia.
The main cause
of poverty is that the people are eking out a living on a swathe
of very degraded land. There are two categories of
inhabitant: native Dayaks deprived of their traditional forest
resource and obliged to turn to settled agriculture on the local
acid sand and peat known as kerangas, and an in-migrant
population consisting of Javanese who, though proficient farmers
on their own rich soils, are struggling to survive on the
nutrient-poor soils of the area where they were deposited by the
Government transmigration programme. SD(B) initiated a sustainable livelihoods programme in 1999 with 2-year funding from the National Lotteries Charities Board. An initial Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) helped the villagers to start their own micro-enterprises. Capacity building was then undertaken, with an emphasis on training for skills such as leadership, marketing, and microfinance management. These enabled the communities to relate more positively to outside organisations such as banks, universities, government agencies, local NGOs and the private sector (mainly concerned with logging, mining and plantations). A final evaluation has just been carried out by an external assessor, Dr. Francis Wahono. He made a number of positive comments on the project, gave some useful suggestions for further improvements, and was keen to be involved with further developments. In January 2002, SD(B) obtained funding of £99,000 from the Community Fund for a two year extension to the programme to build on the successful work to date. This will concentrate on training and community capacity building, developing new livelihood opportunities, assisting villagers to improve their environment and extending the work to new client villages. Read about some of the key activities of the project Read about an evaluation visit to the project in March 2003 Read about an evaluation visit to the project in January 2002 |
