By : Ponco Nugroho, Program Manager

To empower the poors, do not give them the “fish”, but give them the hook”. Hook is synonym for tool, a tool for fishing. There are many kinds of hooks, such as fish-hook, , fish-net, rumpon and else that could be use to do fishing. The expectation is simple : with this tool, the poors could work to get “fishes” by themselves. Any work done by ourselves, tends to be more sustained and respectfull rather then “begging” to others. And the results shall be more precious as well. There is a lesson that could be learned from Rasulullah SAW, the one that he gave axe to a beggar, then the beggar went to the forest to find for woods himself.

If we think deeper, nowadays, the problem of poor people are getting more complicated. Years ago, the problems  mostly only lack of capital or skills. With capital, they could acces the natural resources surrounding them and using the skills they had. At present, it is not as simple as that in the past. The natural resources that used to be the income sources, are no longer available. Forests are cut. Some of them grabbed by the big businessmen. Poor people who have skills to sell things in traditional markets, could only taking deep breath. They will lose thecompetition with Supermarkets, marts that come to the villages. For farmers, they are confious with unpredictable weather, no fixed season anymore, when to plant, when to  yield. The weather forecast are always mis-forecasted, blame it to the global climate changing. And so the farmers are having problem to decide what kind of plants that should be planted. Even if they had good yields,  brokers, moneylendersand also government policies (for example in fertilizers prices) were ready to get them. Then they will have trouble for the next planting season.

Community empowerment should be able to create spirit of entrepreneurship inside the poors. Many are still doubt it, whether it could or could not. If our way of thingking is to give them “hook”, then we must prepare for the worst that they will lose in competition with local businessmen that sometimes having less social awareness than their business awareness.The better choice is to give “hook” as well as knowledge to choose the right “hook”. They are also needed to be given other knowledge about location or sources of “fish” that are estimated be able to produce more fishes to be brought home, about market so that they know how they are paid for their hardwork. They need to be facilitated by someone with certain expertise to give motivation, being their friends in happy and sorrow, helping to solve their problems. Facilitators could also assist them to plan for their future.

Masyarakat Mandiri would like to strengthen its position as community facilitation organization/ institution. However, MM also relises and believes that hooks given to the community are sometimes not effective enough to improve their welfare or even to have it more sustained. We have to ensure that they have capabilities to use the hook in the right way, taking care of it and develop confidence that this hookl is part of noble effort for life. Waallhu’alam.