IPB Students Empower the Community through Five Fingers

Muara Gembong Area, Bekasi District has become one of the mangrove tourism destinations which has a large seaweed cultivation area. Sadly, not all the seaweed can be sold. A portion of it is always thrown out and not utilized.

Students of Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) gave a solution on utilizing the seaweed which had gone unutilized at the same time to empower the fishermen wives and youth of Muara Gembong to produce a featured product using seaweed as the base.

The five students are Liza Amelia Fauziyah, Rizky Eko Muliawan, Mayrani Tika Mulyana, Puspita Rahayu and Alfat Naufin Nazmi from the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Science IPB. This creative idea passed as one of the participants of the National Student Scientific Week (Pimnas) 2018 in the Student Creativity Program (PKM) division which was supervised by Ir. Endang Sunarwati Srimariana, M.Si.

Eko explained that the empowerment which was done was towards the fishermen’s wives and the young women who didn’t finish school. “We tried to train and give knowledge to the wives and young women to create a product from unused seaweed. The result products were umpet nuts, crackers, and souvenirs with the base ingredient of seaweed as one of the unique souvenirs from Muara Gembong,” explains Eko.

The method which was used by Eko and the team was the five finger program which covers the entire production to marketing process.

“We used the development of the five finger managment program (Algacraft) which is featured product, managment, publication and marketing, quality control monitoring, and human resource development. We started by educating and training to create a featured product from Muara Gembong. Then, we created a community for the wives to manage the production process, and to control the quality of the product from hygiene and other factors,” explained Eko.

Eko hopes that the program they brought will give an impact towards all elements of the community. “We hope the wives there can develop more variants from the products, other than that it can be in the form of developed household businesses. We will try to socialize this to the Regent and the related agencies to make use of the potential seaweed as the special feature of Muara Gembong,” Eko hopes. (AVR)