On a humid morning in early 2025, a primary school in eastern Indonesia received its first delivery under Indonesia’s new free school meal programme. The promise was simple and powerful: children would receive nutritious meals in school, and no child would have to learn on an empty stomach.
Yet the delivery arrived late. By the time the food reached the school, several items had spoiled in transit. With no refrigeration facilities on site and students already waiting for class, the school principal faced a difficult choice: serve meals that might pose food safety risks or cancel the programme for the day and explain to parents why their children would still go hungry despite a national promise of free meals.
This scene captured the central dilemma facing Indonesia’s Program Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG). The programme was not only about feeding children, but also whether a large, decentralised and geographically fragmented state could turn a major political commitment into safe, reliable and sustainable public service delivery.
A Promise with High Stakes
Indonesia’s free school meal programme was one of the most ambitious social policy commitments in the country’s recent history. Announced as a flagship policy of the new administration, MBG aimed to reduce child malnutrition, improve educational outcomes and strengthen long-term human capital development. The ambition was vast: to reach up to 83 million beneficiaries nationwide by 2029, with an initial budget allocation of IDR 71 trillion.
The policy rationale was clear. Indonesia continued to face serious nutrition challenges among children. According to Indonesia’s 2023 Health Survey, about 20 per cent of children under five experienced stunting. Among school-aged children, the survey also recorded stunting, wasting, overweight and anaemia at levels that remained a public health concern. These were not only health statistics. They pointed to deeper questions about learning, inequality and future productivity.
Malnutrition could affect cognitive development, school attendance and concentration. School feeding programmes, when well-designed and properly implemented, could therefore offered more than just a provided meal. They could support educational participation, reduced pressure on low-income households and strengthen a country’s future workforce. In that sense, MBG was not only a welfare programme, but also an investment in Indonesia’s next generation.
When Ambition Meets Administration
However, the hardest part of social policy was often not the announcement. It was the implementation.
Indonesia’s geography made MBG especially complex. The country’s school system stretched across more than 17,000 islands and operated within one of the world’s most decentralised governance structures. Responsibility for implementation involved national ministries, provincial authorities, district governments, schools and private suppliers. Many of these actors had to coordinate across very different local conditions, often with uneven infrastructure, administrative capacity and market readiness.
This created a basic but difficult question: could a national promise be delivered evenly across such a diverse country?
In better-resourced urban districts, supplier networks, storage facilities and trained personnel were more likely to be available. In rural and remote areas, particularly in underdeveloped, frontier and outermost regions, the situation was more difficult. Some schools lacked refrigeration facilities. Some districts faced weak transport links. Others had limited capacity to monitor hygiene, food safety and supplier performance. A programme that looked straightforward on paper became far more complicated once it had to move through kitchens, roads, warehouses, schools and local bureaucracies.
Food safety quickly became one of the most visible risks. MBG was designed to replace a fragmented school food environment with a more regulated supply chain. Yet early implementation exposed weaknesses in storage, handling and quality assurance. Reports of food contamination and student illness created public concern and placed pressure on policymakers to strengthen oversight.
Fiscal sustainability created another layer of difficulty. The initial allocation of IDR 71 trillion signalled strong political commitment, but the expected cost of nationwide expansion raised questions about long-term affordability and opportunity cost. If MBG required substantially higher expenditure in future years, policymakers would need to consider whether it could crowd out other education, health or social investments. A programme designed to support children could lose credibility if it weakened other parts of the public system.
Speed, Quality or Trust?
For Indonesian policymakers, the central issue was therefore not whether feeding children was desirable. Few would dispute the moral and developmental value of improving child nutrition. The harder question was how quickly the government should scale the programme while maintaining quality, fiscal discipline and public trust.
A rapid nationwide rollout offered political advantages. It could show that the government was serious about fulfilling its campaign promise and could bring immediate benefits to millions of children and households. However, speed also increased the risk of operational failure. If food safety incidents multiplied, or if delivery became unreliable, public confidence could erode quickly.
A more decentralised approach could allow local governments to adapt procurement and delivery to regional conditions. This might improve responsiveness and community ownership. Local suppliers, farmers and catering providers could also benefit from stable demand created by the programme.Yet decentralisation carried its own risks. If local capacity varied widely, service quality could become uneven and poorer districts might fall further behind.
A phased approach would allow the government to focus first on high-need regions while building stronger administrative systems, supplier networks, food safety protocols and monitoring capacity. This could improve quality before national expansion. However, slowing the rollout could be politically difficult, especially when public expectations were already high.
A hybrid model might offer the most balanced path: national standards for nutrition, procurement and food safety, combined with local delivery and stronger digital monitoring. India’s Mid-Day Meal Scheme showed how broad national programmes could combine central policy direction with local execution, supported by monitoring technologies, community participation and state-level coordination.Such a model could preserve flexibility while improving accountability. However, it would require investment in data systems, inter-agency coordination and technical capacity.
The Wider Lesson
Indonesia’s MBG experience offered a broader lesson for policymaking in Asia. Social policy success depends not only on ambition, budget size or political will. It also depends on delivery systems.
Large-scale welfare programmes require institutions that can coordinate across ministries, levels of government and private actors. They required supply chains that can deliver safely and reliably. They required monitoring systems that can detect problems early. Most importantly, they required public trust. Once citizens begin to doubt whether a programme is safe, fair or financially sustainable, even a well-intentioned policy can become politically fragile.
MBG showed that the implementation of social policy is often where the real policy test begins. A government might be able to announce a national promise quickly, but building the systems needed to keep that promise takes time. For Indonesia, the challenge was not simply to feed more children. It was to decide how to do so in a way that protected quality, safeguarded public resources and maintained confidence in the state.
At its heart, the free school meal programme asked a simple question with complex implications: how much risk should a government tolerate when delivering a policy that affects millions of children?
The answer would shape more than the future of MBG. It would also reveal how Indonesia balanced political urgency with administrative capacity, and how far a national promise could travel across the realities of geography, institutions and everyday implementation.
Read the case study Nourishing a Nation – Indonesia’s Free School Meal Initiative written by Lim Jun Yi,which was awarded the Distinguished Prize in the Case Writing Competition 2025/26 at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Access more case studies from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
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