Empowerment for Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises of fishermen's wives in Tileng, Girisubo

By: Daniel.          

The series of Marine Economy activities of Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta also includes community empowerment, as a follow up after students gain new insights about Indonesia's marine potential and its challenges of the coast of Yogyakarta. The community empowerment done is through digital marketing learning and the use of social media, for the fishermen's wives in Nanas, Tileng, Girisubo, Gunungkidul, DIY (Saturday, 13/05/2023).

They have started to process marine products into fish floss, nuggets, and tuna meatballs. All are the catches from south coast with port of Sadeng as the center. However, the marketing area is still in local sub-district and they want to market the product more widely but do not know what steps to take. In this case, Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta comes to share knowledge and helps them.

To strengthen the digital marketing capacity, Kresensia Risna Efrieno from Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta team who has Empowerment Communication study background, revealed that the development of the internet is very fast even reaching remote villages and information spreads massively.  On the other hand, the community is required to be adaptive to implement new habits quickly and practical, including the presence of digital platforms through social media as the places to interact with various age segment, even they can never be separated. It is a marketing or promotional opportunity for a brand or product using digital media or internet to attract potential customers widely, quickly, and precisely. Social media is an alternative way to participate, interact, sharing quickly market or promote products, and it is not impossible that the product will be very quickly spread widely and the sales increase.

The next session with Yonatan Pristiaji Nugroho, an Accounting Economics student, mapped what social media and what social media widely used by people as the target consumers, whether through WhatsApp, Facebook, Tiktok or other social media. This mentoring also trains participants to make videos containing explanations of their products, displaying interesting product photos, how to take pictures and determine supporting words or captions that attract buyers, and when the right time for promotional posts.

The activity continued, the Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta team changed to learn to make tuna floss, a product of local fishermen's wives. The ingredients needed include fresh tuna, cooking oil, brown sugar, salt, coriander, ginger, garlic, onion, tamarind, lemongrass and orange leaves. The stages are (1) clean the fish with no head, then steam it until well-cooked and take out the fish bone and crush it until smooth, (2) grind herbs and spices and mix all ingredients and fry for approximately 45 minutes, (3) drain from oil using a spinner for better results, (4) after cooling, put in packs of 50 grams at a price of 10-20 thousand per piece.

This activity is a transfer of knowledge between Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta and fishermen's wives as MSME actors to increase capacity, especially capturing new opportunities in business. Even though from the village, they can still reach wider marketing because of communication technology. Let's explore the digital marketing so that products will be better known.***

What comes to your mind when you imagine a house to live in? Material? The budget? The model? Who will work on it? or something else? Have you ever thought about the concept of a safe and comfortable home at an affordable cost? The concept of an economical house without draining your wallet by utilizing local resources is interesting, isn't it?

Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta with several students visited a house in Tamanmartani, Kalasan, Sleman, Yogyakarta Special Region to enrich students' knowledge and insight about resilient infrastructure. The students dialogued directly with Iswanti Suparma, the owner of a house with a unique model, different from the common houses found in Indonesia, called the Earthbag Roundhouse (Saturday, 6 May 2023).

The concept of the house came from Iswanti’s wish who knows the condition of the land where she lives is vulnerable to natural disasters, such as earthquakes. She looked for ways to build houses in the prone zone to earthquakes, but her house was not just built but also comfortable to live in. Iswanti searched for literature and Googled the internet until she found a building concept called an earthquake-resistant building, namely SuperAdobe or local resource-based housing. SuperAdobe was designed by Nader Khalili, an Iranian-American architect. Iswanti adopted the concept for her house which is round in shape and made of soil and other elements, such as sand, clay piled in long sacks and arranged in a circle to form the walls of the house.

The uncommon model of the house ignited people’s curiosity, even the workers had never worked for such a house like that. Iswanti needed time to convince them and gave them a new understanding of the building concept through various ways, like discussions, and learning from videos about similar buildings.

The main materials needed are long sacks, soil, barbed wire, sterilized cow dung, and dolomite. One layer of a rounded wall required 24 meters long, while a 1-meter-high wall requires 6 layers of sacks or 144 meters long. So, to build 8 meters high wall, it needed 1.152 meters. The house is round with a conical roof that is adaptive to the wind and tends to be safe when an earthquake occurs because the load is distributed to all directions and the material is not rigid. Another uniqueness of this house is the use of used accessories, such as used bottles, used wood, leftover concrete buis, and tree branches to add aesthetics. The construction process of the two houses took three years until they were ready for occupancy.

Participants were enthusiastic to see and go around the house and find many questions. Iswanti admitted that the construction of this house is not expensive, "The concept of building this house does not require a bulk of money because I did not buy all materials at building shop, anyone can do it even an amateur worker," she said. The students' encounter with Iswanti at the earthbag roundhouse sparked the participants' imaginations to find different and unique house designs that are economical and resilient to disaster threats.

The readiness of a safe and comfortable home or shelter is a form of our concern for life sustainability, therefore, what your dream home looks like? Dare to be different? Create your dream home that is comfortable, strong, and resilient without leaving the local potencies around. ***

"Saturday morning, May 27, 2006 at 05:55 A.M (Western Indonesian Time), an earthquake measuring 5.9  Richter scale hit Yogyakarta and its surroundings. This earthquake made thousands of infrastructures  collapsed and severely damaged, even took thousands of life. One of the worst affected areas is Sengir sub-district, Sumberharjo Village, Prambanan, Sleman, Yogyakarta Special Region. The buildings and houses in this hillside area were destroyed and no longer possible to live in."

The flashback above is an explanation from Amin, one of the managers of Domes Houses Tourism Village. He also told the history which began with one of the non-profit social organizations, World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (WANGO) in the United States which provided special relief in the form of domes houses under the name of Domes for the World for the residents of the relocation of Sengir in September 2006 with 80 units in total, consisting of 71 houses and 9 public facilities. The dome house is 7 meters in diameter for residential houses and 9 meters for public facilities.

The unique domes house design and  the first construction built in Indonesia become a consideration of Stube HEMAT students to have for study visit. The visit hosted by Daniel Prasdika opened students' insights and awareness of the threat of disasters in Indonesia, especially what threatens students' home areas. The group of Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta students was welcomed by Amin, the managers of the Domes House Tourism Area, and Heri as the vice chairman (Monday, 1/05/2023). Next, participants divided themselves into 4 groups, that each group is focusing on one topic covering the dynamics of tourist villages, building structures, how-to live-in domes houses, and the legality of the building. They went around and saw the domes' house and had a dialogue with the residents.

In the presentation, the tourism village dynamics group said that initially the domes house was not a tourist spot, however its unique shape like a moci cake provoked public to visit. Finally, local residents took the opportunity by creating a tourism village program and participated training to form a tourism village, even though it is currently vacant due to Covid-19. The building structure group described the domes house physically as having two floors where the lower floor is for the living room, two bedrooms and kitchen, while the upper floor is for storing goods or multipurpose rooms. Construction begins with making a floor foundation without digging the ground and it is just built on the ground. It became the hallmark of domes houses. After drying, a large balloon is set to create a hemispherical skeleton with woven iron construction. The group on how to live in a domes house revealed the shortcomings of the domes house, such as the warm temperature inside the house because the cast walls absorb heat, and the outer walls need special care. Its advantages are resistant to earthquakes, storms and even fires. Some residents said that after the earthquake, they were forced by condition to live there because they had nowhere else, next they needed time to adapt. The building legality group said that the status of the domes house was not yet free personal-own as the rent was Rp. 1 million/year paid to the village. Indeed, the local village government has taken care the property right, but until the activity is carried out the status is still uncertain.

This visit equips students with new knowledge, to be more sensitive to disaster threats, to learn how to create safer homes and to create economic opportunities as a tourist village. It seems a blessing in disguise, an invisible blessing of suffering. Finally, thank you for the knowledge, networks and tourist opportunities. ***

Disasters occur unpredictably and often threaten human life, for this reason, it is necessary to live side by side with disasters and have the knowledge and readiness to deal with them. In Indonesia, the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) revealed that in 2022 there were 3.544 disasters, such as floods, extreme weather and landslides, forest and land fires, earthquakes, tidal waves and abrasion, and droughts. Some people do not fully understand how to anticipate and deal with disaster, resulting in many victims and losses when it occurs. So, everyone needs to know about disaster readiness.

The above thoughts are the starting point for Stube HEMAT to equip students in Yogyakarta coming from various regions in Indonesia, to know the threat of disasters in their area, how to prepare themselves, and what kind of proper education for the local community. With the theme 'Do We Ready to Face Disaster?' Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta and students made a study visit to the earthquake museum of Prof. Dr. Sarwidi in Kaliurang, Special Region of Yogyakarta (Monday, May 1, 2023).

In this exposure, Trustha Rembaka, the coordinator of Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta, introduced the institution and students to Prof. Dr. Sarwidi and the museum staff. He also conveyed the purpose of the study visit to enrich students' insights about earthquake preparedness and references to earthquake-resistant buildings. Next, Prof. Dr. Sarwidi introduced the earthquake museum than began since July 2006 as a public education as well as an educational tourist spot. This idea came up because the Indonesian people did not fully understand the dangers of natural disasters.

He said that earthquakes occur because the earth is 'alive', meaning the earth is moving. When it moves, the earth releases energy and causes earthquakes from small to strong energy. If the earth does not release energy, it is dangerous because the earth can explode. So, people have to adapt to the earthquake phenomenon, from self-awareness, and knowledge to the quality of infrastructure for building public facilities. Participants explored earthquake models, replicas of destroyed buildings, and miniatures of Barrataga constructions found by Prof. Dr. Sarwidi since 2003.

Barrataga is an earthquake-resistant house building taking into the shape of the house by considering the locality, so the building design uses a common house with reinforcement in certain parts, such as walls, frames, and foundations, to the roof structure. These parts are designed to be an integral system. A layer of sand under the foundation with a certain thickness as a damper, modified concrete reinforcement to adapt to tensile forces and remain flexible, reinforcement of walls with columns using anchors, and modification of fibrous walls to reduce the brittleness of the walls.

With current advanced technological developments, participants studied the InaRISK, an application that provides regional data and disaster threats, affected populations, and potential losses, including disaster mitigation guidelines, so that people can recognize specific disaster threats in the area where they live and disaster risk reduction steps. The students also downloaded this application and practiced mapping disaster threats. They filled out a questionnaire to measure whether their house was earthquake-resistant or not, according to the existing application instructions. It turned out that most of their houses were not suitable for earthquake-resistant construction structures.

From this exposure, Mensiana Baya, a student from East Sumba said, “I just found out that there is an application that helps the house-building process. This is very helpful when building a house and I can share it with my family. This visit was very valuable because my study was in the education department and there was no specific lesson about disasters and building structures.”

Ready or not, earthquakes surely happen, and humans must adapt with enough knowledge about earthquakes and other disasters. With knowledge about strong infrastructure, a safer life can be achieved. ***