Policy Research
In mid-2010, The SMERU Research Institute and UNICEF initiated a collaboration to promote issues concerning the child, vulnerability, and poverty. As some of our readers may already know, the Institute has been in the forefront of conducting studies and producing analyses on a wide range of areas related to poverty, e.g., social protection, health, and education, for over a decade.
The existing dichotomy between the central and regional governments under the framework of decentralization may pose policy gaps. Lack of protection for migrant workers is one example of the effects of these policy gaps.
It has been over a decade since efforts began to develop good communication and effective dialogs between researchers and policymakers. Although facing many challenges, efforts to matchmake research and policy have not wearied over the years. They have even gained larger support.
Indonesia faces enormous challenges in emigration governance. With an annual placement of not less than half a million people, three quarters of whom are women working in the domestic sphere, overseas employment is indeed a task too huge for the central government to handle alone. More often than seldom, the issues of human rights emerge in combination with the massive outflow of migrant workers.
The first child poverty and disparity study conducted in Indonesia in 2010–2011 revealed that in 2009, despite progress made towards reducing income deprivation and other dimensions of deprivation, around 55.8% of Indonesian children lived in households with a per capita consumption of less than PPP $2 a day, 17.4% lived below the official (national) poverty line, and 10.6% lived on less than PPP $1 per day.
