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Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has signed off on Indonesia’s biggest free food program in years as Indonesian officials struggle to rein in the $15bn spending amid allegations of corruption and mismanagement.
Launched in 2025, the “Free Lunch” program aims to tackle the problem of stuttering among children, improve their interest in school, and strengthen the local economy.
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According to the World Bank, Indonesia has halved the rate of stuttering in the last 10 years to 20 percent of children nationwide.
Over the past 18 months, the program has established nearly 28,000 kitchens, each providing schools and communities with up to 3,000 meals a day.
Critics say the program is too large and ineffective to be effective, while the service has also been implicated in thousands of food poisonings.
The project has also attracted international attention since authorities arrested the head of Indonesia’s National Nutrition Agency and two of his ministers in early June for a $56m procurement fraud.
Authorities have expanded their investigation to seven people, including a police officer who worked with a soldier.
After spending $2.8bn for the program to start in 2025, the government in May cut this year’s budget from $18.4bn to $14.7bn following Prabowo’s instructions to spend the money “appropriately and efficiently”.
But critics like Ronny Sasmita, a senior researcher at the Indonesia Strategic and Economic Action Institution, a Jakarta-based think tank., saying that Indonesia can’t afford even a modest plan for the policy, which is supported by money from the health and education budget.
Worse, Samsmita said, the government has created a huge opportunity for corruption.
“From a financial perspective, the alleged corruption in the ‘Free Food for Free Food’ program is considered one of the most important crimes in Indonesia in recent years, on a large and systematic scale,” Sasmita told Al Jazeera.
“The most interesting thing is not the size of the budget involved, because the program is designed to help people around the world, but also the size of the movement in all regions, which creates a lot of entry points to be destroyed,” he said.
Although the kitchens established under the program are funded by the government, they are managed by franchises and a network of foundations and not through school canteens.
Some of these foundations have ties to the police and the military, according to the Center for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), an Indonesian think tank that has conducted several studies on the program.
Kitchen operators also receive a “daily incentive” of 6 million rupiah ($324), which was described by the head of the food agency they were arrested as signs of “Congratulations from the government to the workers who have volunteered to build this facility.”
About 18,000 kitchens, more than half of the program’s facilities, are located on the island of Java, Indonesia’s richest and most populous island, according to local media reports.
So far, about 270 kitchens have been set up in eastern Papua, which has six of Indonesia’s worst-hit regions, and Bali, the region with the lowest risk.
Additional kitchens
“The most remote areas, the poorest areas, the areas where the programs are running low are the ones that don’t do the best,” said Annette Mau, a member of the Indonesian Mothers Alliance, which is one of the organizations that oversees the free food program.
“Why are they spending public money to feed children from rich families when some children are still facing food problems? This is a very big policy issue,” Mau told Al Jazeera.
Critics also object to kitchens that cater to children of all ages up to high school, even though anti-shock techniques are more effective for pregnant and lactating women and young children.
According to the government survey, pregnant women and small children are only 5 percent of the 25.78 million received between January and September 2025.
The program’s image has also been tarnished by thousands of poisonings, which have reached 33,000 since April 2026, according to the Indonesia Education Monitoring Network.
Coordinating Minister of Food Zulkifli Hasan told reporters in June that the program is operating about 7,000 additional kitchens, with fees for these additional facilities alone costing the government trillions of rupiah ($54m) per month.
He added that work permits may have been bought and sold by workers, causing the kitchens to become more crowded than intended.
Indonesia’s National Nutrition Agency and Prabowo’s office did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Vid Adrison, who is the head of the Department of Economics at the University of Indonesia, said that community groups have said that the government can save money by using existing facilities, such as school canteens.
“Each school has its own canteen, and they already cook food according to the students’ preferences,” Adrison told Al Jazeera.
“Why not just renovate existing schools instead of building new kitchens?”
Officials have signaled change amid opposition to the release.
Last month, the National Nutrition Agency said it would prepare a special strategy to target women and young children “in underdeveloped, border, and remote areas” of Indonesia. known as “3T Regions.”
Another $2.2bn will soon be on the horizon as the government seeks to wind down the program.
Changes are also being made to the “motivational scheme,” according to local media, although details have not been disclosed.
Prabowo, meanwhile, will continue to defend his popular program as a success story.
Ask farmers and fishermen. Ask the children. Is it (the program) worth it or not? Prabowo said in a speech last month, according to Indonesian news agency Antara.
“Some wise people say there are more important things than an empty stomach, I don’t think there is anything more urgent than an empty stomach,” he said.
When a hungry person does not fill his stomach, he dies.
