KUCHING: Sarawak aims to eradicate hardcore poverty by 2018.

In pointing this out, Minister of Welfare, Women and Community Wellbeing Datuk Fatimah Abdullah said the state was adopting a new approach and strategy by working with various departments and agencies to achieve the target.

“The state is targeting to address the problem of poverty in the state by 2018 and to achieve that we will be working

with other departments and agencies, which have similar programmes and objective to eradicate poverty.

“Working with other departments and agencies (having similar objective) will enable us to have an integrated, holistic and well structured focus,” Fatimah told a press conference yesterday in the state operations room at Level 2, Wisma Bapa Malaysia, Petra Jaya here.

Earlier, Fatimah and Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas jointly chaired the state Poverty Eradication Focus Group meeting – the fourth meeting this year.

According to Fatimah, the target was stated by Uggah in the meeting as a key performance indicator (KPI) of the group.

She stressed that working with different departments and agencies like Manpower Department to provide suitable jobs for those registered under e-Kasih would complement the 1Azam programmes organised by her ministry.

There are about 30,000 hardcore poor (households with income of RM660 and below) in the state, representing about 1.13 per cent of its total population of 2.66 million.

For this reason, Fatimah said the state was allocated RM40 million this year to carry out the 1Azam programmes to help the 2,500 persons registered under e-Kasih.

According to her, the state has received RM20 million of the allocation and the remaining RM20 million would be received at a later stage.

Fatimah also said her ministry, as the coordinator of the 1Azam programmes, would submit a catch-up plan to speed up the process in several key areas like business matching, validation and procurement that had been identified.

At the conference were Ministry of Welfare, Women and Community Wellbeing senior principal assistant secretary Dr Zafar Yadi and Sarawak Development Office (SDO) senior assistant director Masnah Abang Abu Bakar.