Selection of Districts

The Terms of Reference call for the TA to provide assistance to the local government authorities in 10-12 districts on pro-poor planning and budgeting and related capacity building needs. The team initially prepared the short list of 25 districts presented below using quantitative indicators, and a final list of 11 districts is determined based on a consultative process that gave priority to those districts where the leadership are most committed to participate in a positive way to achieve improved pro-poor planning and budgeting reform.

In a large nation such as Indonesia there is a great diversity of conditions and targeting of special assistance to achieve maximum positive impacts is always a concern. To achieve maximum national impact from the TA, the team initially identified several provinces to represent the main geographical regions of Indonesia , i.e. Sumatra; Java -Bali; Sulawesi; Kalimantan; and eastern Indonesia . The team then utilized data from various sources to select one or two provinces in each of the five regions. The criteria applied in this process are as follows:

a) Incidence of Poverty - The ranking of the provinces according to the incidence (%) of poverty as measured by BPS through the Susenas survey has been adopted. Application of these criteria places the provinces of eastern Indonesia as the lowest ranking.

b) Poverty Head Count - The ranking of the provinces in the head count of those living below the poverty line has been applied. BPS/ Susenas data has provided the basis for the rankings. The provinces of Java are those where the greatest number of the poor are found and were ranked as the lowest in the scoring systems applied.

c) Indicators of the MDGs – The indicators for MDGs applied are for health, education and water supply. The indicators used are births attended by skilled health personnel, enrolment ratio in primary education and percentage of households with access to clean water.

Application of these criteria to the main regions of Indonesia produced a ranking of the provinces for each region. It is noted that the analysis revealed that the provinces of Kalimantan ranked significantly lower that those of other regions of the nation for the criteria used, and consequently it was decided not to short-list any of the provinces of Kalimantan for further consideration. After short-listing the provinces of the other regions, the team then applied the same criteria for selection of districts within each of the short-listed provinces.

The detailed scoring and rankings of provinces and districts are presented in .......(see detail)