Save the Children and its partners (TIFA Foundation and YLBHI) are implementing a two-year project entitled HEAL: Promote Human Rights and Equality to Achieve Sustainability in West Nusa Tenggara and East Java, Indonesia, with financial contribution from the European Union. The objective of the project is to better protect the human rights of vulnerable groups, including children, with the focus on strengthening their rights to government social protection.
This project is expected to produce the following five outputs.
- Human rights (including child rights) violations during the pandemic are well-documented and disseminated.
- Communities and human rights defenders are equipped to protect human rights and use referral mechanisms.
- Government representatives and media are sensitized to the rights of the most vulnerable groups, minorities, and children.
- Access to government social protection programs is socially inclusive and mechanisms to promote transparency and accountability are developed.
- Regional and national governments acknowledge the approaches developed to make access to social protection based on a human rights framework.
Transparency and accountability are generally a problem in social protection programs and this has surfaced extensively during the distribution of COVID-19 social assistance in villages. Through the HEAL project, Save the Children and its partners would like to enhance the inclusion, transparency, and accountability of government social protection programs focusing on the Village Fund and Family of Hope Program (Program Keluarga Harapan/PKH). More specifically, the objectives of this project are divided into two parts.
- For cash transfers from the Village Fund, this project aims at:
- broadly analyzing the inclusion, exclusion, transparency, and accountability of the cash transfers from the Village Fund distributed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in selected villages of the HEAL project area, and
- developing a practical community-based targeting (CBT) guideline (including inclusion, transparency, and accountability measures to be adopted) that the villages can use to improve the targeting of the Village Fund from next year onwards. Although the guideline will be developed specifically for the Village Fund, it can also be used for the targeting of other government social protection funds that are extended to the villages to support identification of beneficiaries.
- For PKH, this project aims at:
- developing a short paper analyzing the targeting approach implemented in the villages where PKH was extended as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the pros and cons of the strategy used regarding inclusion/exclusion, transparency, and accountability; and
- drafting a document describing (i) practical approaches that can be used to make PKH more inclusive when adding on new beneficiaries and (ii) ways inclusion, transparency, and accountability can be improved at the village level.
- Desk review of relevant studies of the Village Fund and PKH to inform the project
- Discussions/interviews with village representatives, groups of villagers, and selected actors that understand issues relevant to the objectives
- Discussions with CBT experts and the national government
