PRAKARSA Working Paper No. 01 – Multidimensional Poverty and Risk of COVID-19 in Indonesia

Our study aims to analyze the vulnerability of the Indonesian population to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study is based on deprivation calculations from Indonesia's Multidimensional Poverty Index in determining the level of risk faced by Indonesians. It is estimated that 176,04 million people out of 264 million people or 66,62 percent of Indonesia's population are at risk of being infected with COVID-19. Of the 176 million people who are in the at-risk group, there are at least 21,43 million people or 8,11 percent who are multidimensionally poor. We estimate that the multidimensionally poor population in Indonesia is 21,58 million people. This shows that most of the multidimensionally poor population in Indonesia is vulnerable to being infected with COVID-19. On the other hand, there are around 1,27 million multidimensionally poor people who are at high risk of being infected with COVID-19. Regionally, the number of people who are more susceptible to COVID-19 infection tends to be concentrated on the island of Java. Based on regional characteristics, as many as 93,34 million people or 66,78 percent who live in urban areas are at risk.

We also found a strong positive correlation between the number of people at risk and the number of multidimensionally poor people in a province in Indonesia. We also carry out simulations using the SEIR model to estimate the number of people affected from each risk group if there is a social restriction policy or not. We use several simulation scenarios to more diversely estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that an effective social restriction policy was able to significantly reduce the number of people affected. In a simulation for multidimensionally poor groups at risk, if there is no social restriction policy, then the number of people in that group who can be infected with COVID-19 reaches 1,13 million people. However, if there is a social restriction policy, the number of infected people in this group can be reduced to 27.348 people at a very slow policy effectiveness and can be reduced to 830 people at the best effective social restriction policies.