Yogyakarta – Due to high number of empowerment program that should be carried out made Society Empowerment Council of Muhammadiyah Central Executive needed to produce more facilitator cadres who would be able and were willing to carry out the empowerment program for the poor and those who were located far from frantic media and reporting. Currently, MPM of PP Muhammadiyah had recruited dozens of young facilitators from universities in Yogyakarta such as Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Universitas Ahmad Dahlan, Universitas Gajah Mada, Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, and Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga.

This was delivered by the Secretary MPM of PP Muhammadiyah, Bachtiar Dwi Kurniawan, when he was contacted by the editorial board on Sunday afternoon (03/29). According to him, the empowerment –planned programs were programs that needed high energy as well as adequate skill, capability, and capacity in order to reach the target of society empowerment program. “Right now we have some focus on the empowerment program; among them are sustainable farming, UKM group supervising, pedicab driver supervising, and regional government advocacy and supervision for the disables so that they would be independent and to ensure that the government grant their rights,” he explained. The focus of the program, according to Bachtiar, would need lots of energy as well as skillful human resources to fulfill the empowerment activities so that it would exceed the hope and expectation. “Currently, we have recruited dozens of facilitators and we have done some training to strengthen their capacity in facilitator school that we held some time ago. We hope that they would be committed to do this empowerment program, in which not everyone would be willing to do,” he said.

Furthermore, according to the Lecturer of Public Administration of UMY, the facilitators from MPM would joined directly to the groups under the supervision of MPM, which were spread to many regions, and as facilitators, they would support the Expert Consultant from MPM to give training and supervision. “We need to maximize the implementation of these empowerment programs, we need to accelerate our effort in helping the poor and marginalized groups, because if these programs work slowly, the number of poor people and marginalized groups will increase, according to the weakening of Indonesian economy state recently,” he affirmed. (mac)