Every morning, Indah (18 years old) wakes early to catch the company bus from her coastal village in Maros Regency, South Sulawesi. She travels for over one hour to a shrimp manufacturing warehouse in the urban outskirts of Makassar City—the capital of the province.
Despite living in a rural village, she does not have any land to establish herself in farming. She works at a factory, just like many other young women in her village, as there are few options left.
The rural landscape has changed rapidly, driven by expanding urbanisation, mining activities, commodity crops, and infrastructure development—displacing once-fertile agricultural land. As a result, fewer rural young people have access to adequate amounts of farmland to make a viable living from agriculture alone, and lingering informality in the workplace makes stable off-farm employment difficult to find.
