Villages go cyber to promote products, improve market access

Sri Wahyuni , The Jakarta Post, Bantul | Mon, 12/07/2009 12:34 PM

A number of villages in Wukirsari sub-district, Imogiri district, Bantul regency, Yogyakarta, have shown initiative in making their business potential accessible on the Internet through a website that they collectively set up and manage.

Five villages in the sub-district have created hot spots where people can freely access the local Internet connection to download or upload.

"This is part of our way of promoting our potential and attracting more tourists and buyers to come to our villages," head of Wukirsari sub-district Bayu Bintoro told The Jakarta Post recently.

The five hot spot areas are the sub-district's newly built Gazebo hall, the administration hall, at Singosaren village, at Manggung village and the Wukirsari Tourism Information Center (TIC).

Bayu said the idea came from the sub-district's young businessmen under the Wukirsari's youth grouping Karang Taruna, who collectively or individually run businesses as producers of various commodities.

They assembled the hardware to set up the hot spots themselves. "It saved budgets," Bayu said.

Wukirsari, has a youth entrepreneurship pilot project , according to Bayu, comprising 95 business units run by young people. These include batik making, snack production, fisheries and animal husbandry.

The sub-district, he added, had at least three production centers for batik, leather crafts and plaited bamboo products. It also offers scenic village landscapes, making it an attractive place for tourists.

Being a tourist village, Wukirsari offers tour packages which includes a batik-making course and a taste of the sub-district's culinary traditions including wedang uwuh (herbal drink), pecel kembang turi (vegetables served with peanut sauce), abon jambu mete (a dish of fried cashew) and gudheg manggar (a dish made from young coconut palm flowers).

"Although no business orders so far has been made through the Internet, more buyers and tourists have come to the sub-district recently thanks to the information they read on our website," said Bayu, adding that the website was www.wukirsari.com.

Bayu also said that to help improve the quality of the products that his sub-district produced as well as to educate and train the producers to manage their businesses better, his administration had been cooperating with third parties.

The latest example of such cooperation was with the Jogja Heritage Society (JHS) with support from the Australia Indonesia Partnership's Yogyakarta-Central Java community assistance program.

Through an eight-month supervision program for batik makers in the sub-district, which ended last week, JHS provided training and workshops aimed at improving the creativity, professionalism and marketing networking of batik producers.

"Through the program we expect the batik makers, most of whom worked before as artisan out-workers for city-based middle-men, can now help themselves to build up businesses of their own and come up with competitive, quality products," JHS' executive director Titi Handayani said.

Related Articles:

104 Tourism Villages in Indonesia by 2010

Micro Financial Institutions State Degree to be Ready in 2010

Kadin Asks for Wider Access to Micro Loans