Through KOMPAK, Abt Empowers Women in Indonesia
Highlights
- Indonesia wants to reduce poverty while empowering women.
- Abt leads the KOMPAK strategy to empower women socially and economically.
- KOMPAK has led to changes in local governments and business opportunities.
KOMPAK is a partnership between the governments of Indonesia and Australia. Operating across 26 districts in seven provinces, KOMPAK focuses on Indonesia’s two key poverty reduction objectives – improved access to and quality of frontline services, and increased opportunities to hold jobs and earn livelihoods. At the core of this effort is an explicit focus on poor women. Abt is the lead contractor in this effort to help the Government of Indonesia provide poor and vulnerable Indonesians with improved access to basic services and economic opportunities.
Developed by Abt, KOMPAK’s gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) strategy provides KOMPAK teams, strategic partners and counterparts with guidance on designing GESI-specific interventions as well as mainstreaming gender and social inclusion. One approach is to test and scale models that feature women in local leadership and then influence regulatory frameworks and financial flows to sustain these initiatives.
Key results to date include:
- Delivering a 10-month mentoring and training program in village and community governance to more than 2,500 women from across Indonesia, giving them the skills to take a more active role in village planning and management. The program has enabled 262 of these women to take on higher level positions within the village.
- Successfully advocating for raising the legal age of marriage for girls from 14 to 18, then working with provincial and district government partners in West Nusa Tenggara Province (an island region near Bali) to do so.
- Piloting gender and inclusive planning and budgeting training modules for village and subdistrict governments to promote gender and disability responsiveness. KOMPAK is working with government partners to deliver this training to other parts of the country.
Learn more about KOMPAK.