Improving Employment Opportunity in Jakarta's Government Housing

Christover Selawa

Improving Employment Opportunity in Jakarta's Government Housing

As Jakarta pursues its goal to be slum free by 2019, the government has prepared thousands of low-cost apartment units to relocate people living in disposable houses flocking Jakarta's rivers.The slum relocation is also critical to tackle other issues faced by the Jakartans like annual floods, traffic gridlock, and, most importantly, extremely poor living standard of slum dwellers.

Relocation of Jakarta's Slum Dwellers

Recently, such scene is now very familiar to the Jakartans' daily life. As the slums disappear, government housings rise up. 

The Problem

No matter how nice it seems like to live in a proper condition for very low-cost in an expensive city like Jakarta, the poor keeps on resisting the relocation for reasons ranging from 'my family has been here for generations' to 'my daughter's school is close from here'. The most frequent complaint, though, is that the government housings  are too far from their workplace.

Although the government is also working on this problem by providing free-buses and school buses for the dwellers, as you can observe from the picture above, the government housings are located in areas that may offer employment opportunities like gardeners, domestic assistance, shopkeepers, and so on.

How can SNA be helpful?

So, what I am suggesting is for the government to research employment opportunities around the government housings to identify what the prospective employer's needs are before relocating the slum dwellers.

While on the slum sides, the government should take attributes data such as:

- Age

- Skills

- Employment History

- Sex

- Desired employment

By having these 2 data, my suggestion should be obvious by now; data matching.

Data Matching

In the spirit of improving employment opportunity that leads to improvement of living standard, it is imperative that the government locate people based on the slum dwellers' attributes matching the needs of prospective employers in the areas surrounding the government housing. 

While increasing the employment opportunity, this method will also help businesses to reach a close-proximity-and-more-specified worker pools to reach as the government housing will also act as a subgroup of certain skill sets, and/or employment history.

Although I am aware that the employers have the final say on the employment, this method, at least, gives a valid base to reason on where to relocate the slum dwellers.