Coverage and Targeting in the Indonesian Social Safety Net Programs: Evidence from 100 Village Survey

In response to the economic crisis of 1997 the government of Indonesia established a series of programs known as 'safety net' or JPS programs. These were intended to help protect the traditionally poor and newly poor suffering from the crisis in three areas:

• Ensuring the availability of food at affordable prices for the poor;
• Supplementing purchasing power among poor households through employment creation;
• Preserving access of the poor to critical social services such as health and education.

These programs were funded by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and bilateral donors either directly through project support or indirectly through program loans which provide budget support.

This paper intends to provide a preliminary evaluation of how effective the JPS programs have been in achieving their purpose of helping the poor and needy to cope with the crisis impacts. This is done by assessing:

• Coverage of the programs among the poor;
• How benefits have been distributed among the poor and non-poor;

Data was collected in 1998 by the '100 Village Survey' by the Indonesian Central Agency of Statistics. The paper concludes that:

• In many cases the target groups have been missed by the programs both in terms of low coverage and being only loosely targeted in practice;
• Effectiveness of the programs varies across programs and regions.

Overall the general picture indicates:

• Need for large improvement in the program implementation in particular in targeting the beneficiaries of a particular program and raising coverage within the target groups;
• Program implementation should be should be improved to better target the most needy through measures such as extensive information dissemination and intensive monitoring.