Willem is a Social and Community Engagement Specialist within Daemeter’s Social, Smallholder and Livelihoods team. Based in East Kalimantan, his work supports communities in rural and remote settings through livelihood facilitation, farmer empowerment, participatory monitoring, and the kind of long-term stakeholder engagement that builds adaptive learning into landscape and social programmes over time.

With over 25 years of field experience, he brings strong capabilities in community group facilitation, training of trainers, baseline socio-economic surveys, and agricultural extension. He has particular expertise in livelihoods programme design, village-level spatial planning, and participatory monitoring and evaluation, drawing on a technical background in soil science and land assessment. His cross-sector range across mining, forestry, oil palm, and conservation gives him an unusually broad lens on how rural livelihoods interact with different land-use pressures, and his work spans East, Central, West, and North Kalimantan as well as North Maluku.

Willem enjoys hands-on problem solving with communities, especially turning field findings into practical programme choices and feeding learning back into project design. Before Daemeter, he spent over a decade across non-profit development organisations, mining company-linked community programmes, and government research, consistently focused on rural livelihoods and community empowerment.

He holds a BSc in Agronomy from Mulawarman University, with a major in soil science. He is a native Bahasa Indonesia speaker. Whenever the chance comes up, Willem packs a bag and goes travelling.