Coastal Community Development Project

The overall goal of the project is reduction in poverty and enhanced economic growth for poor but active coastal and small island communities. The development objective is increased household incomes for families involved in fisheries and marine activities in the target communities.

The project will be implemented in eastern Indonesia in areas with a high incidence of poverty. The focus will be on a limited number of districts with diverse marine environments and socio-cultural contexts. The project approach has four main elements:

• Community empowerment continues to be a key strategy underlying government development programmes and shapes the mode of implementation, and provides the basis for project investment activities to work and interact.
• The market-focused strategy and associated interventions will enable fisher and marine households to increase sustainable net returns on fish and other marine products. The community's creation of enterprise groups will be the key intervention to open up economic opportunities. The enterprise groups would be "the engine" in the high-potential value chains supported by the project.
• The focus on poverty and pro-poor targeting has been a determining factor in selecting the project communities. Within those communities, the focus is on the economically active poor and their inclusion in project activities.
• The planned replication and scaling up of project activities and processes has also influenced the selection of districts, and resulted in physical and social diversity and the geographical spread of project districts from West Kalimantan to Papua.