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bout 60 percent of Indonesia’s workforce has not attended high school, 45 percent of the country’s villages are stricken with extreme poverty, 37 percent of the nation’s children suffer from stunted growth, and more than 10 percent of its population live in poverty.

These are just a few of the statistics, that indicate how Indonesia, a member of the G20 grouping of the world’s largest economies, has been besieged by a string of protracted problems that have prevented it from punching above its weight.

However, since late 2014, the administration of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has taken the initiative to immediately address these issues through two policies in particular that are not only unprecedented, but are widely believed to be game changers.

The village fund and agrarian reform policies underpin Jokowi’s doctrine of building the nation from the outskirts by empowering villages — a shift from focusing on urban areas as the centers of growth, as pursued by Jokowi’s predecessors.

“Like building a house, we are now constructing a strong foundation by empowering villagers,” Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Minister Eko Putro Sandjojo said during a seminar held on Tuesday by the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister, Independent Research and Advisory Indonesia and Tenggara Strategics — a business intelligence institution, founded by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) — The Jakarta Post and Prasetiya Mulya University.

“How can a house stand strong if its foundations are fragile. And how do you expect villagers to work if they are ill and don’t have access to clean water, sanitation and basic health care? The effects of the fund have yet to be reflected in economic growth, because it is aimed at strengthening the foundation first,” said Eko.

Since 2015, the government has directly transferred cash to every village in the archipelago. The funds are to be spent on infrastructure and are managed independently by the villagers.

This year, Rp 60 trillion (US$4.5 billion) has been channeled to villages, with the figure set to double next year, so that villagers can build basic sanitation facilities, roads, bridges, irrigation and sources of income.

According to the Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Ministry, 46 percent of the nation’s 250 million people still live in villages, and the village fund has helped them build 66,000 kilometers of new roads, 511 km of new bridges and 1,500 traditional markets using the 2016 fund allocation alone.

“We have ignored villages for so long that if we continue to do so we risk enflaming radicalism and separatism,” Eko said, adding that the ministry would soon focus on using the fund to create business opportunities in order for villages to earn sustainable incomes.

The village fund is also aimed at redistributing wealth, as Indonesia suffers from vast and growing inequality, which poses a risk to social cohesion.

Indonesia ranks fourth on the list of the most unequal countries in the world after Russia, India and Thailand, according to Credit Suisse’s 2016 Global Wealth Report.

In addition to the fund, the government has also banked on the ongoing land reforms to reduce inequality by distributing 12.7 million hectares of land, roughly the same size as Greece, to underprivileged households by 2019.

“Villagers have long been denied our attention. To ensure equal development, the crucial issue is to push for a clustered business model to leverage the potential of villages,” said Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution at the same seminar.

The business model involves uniting the land and resource of a village to create economies of scale that will eventually enable the village to sell its products.

Darmin said, however, that this model could only work if the government sped up the redistribution of land and the distribution of land certifications, which are required for villagers to get access to bank loans. (ren/dan)