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Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Minister, Abdul Halim Iskandar.  (ANTARA FOTO/Ist)

Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Minister, Abdul Halim Iskandar, said the Village Fund (DD) program carried out from 2015 to 2020 was able to raise the economy and village equity in the country.

"Including being able to stretch the village income and expenditure budget (APBDes)," he said in a virtual speech on ‘Seven Years of Village Law’, originating from Jakarta on Friday.

In 2014, the total APBDes for all villages in Indonesia amounted to Rp20 trillion. Meanwhile, village funds, which were first disbursed to villages in 2015, reached Rp21 trillion. By 2015, the APBDes of each village in Indonesia had jumped from an average of Rp250 million to Rp500 million.

This condition has made villages favored by many because the rate of village fund disbursal has stimulated district, city, and provincial governments to increase financial assistance and village fund allocations, Iskandar said.He said that before 2015, the total village fund allocation stood at around Rp1 trillion per year. However, now it has increased to more than Rp33 trillion per year, he added.

"It has increased 33 times," the minister remarked.

Not surprisingly, in the seven years of the Village Law, village income and expenditure budgets (APBDes) have increased six-fold to touch Rp121 trillion in 2020, he informed.

Village funds, as stipulated in Law Number 6 of 2014, actually have a similar mechanism to the allocation of village funds, which was implemented in 2010, he added.

“Allocation of village funds is the obligation of local governments, especially districts and cities, to distribute annually to villages,” Iskandar said.

Meanwhile, Minister of Finance (Menkeu), Sri Mulyani Indrawati, has said village funds were intended to finance administration at the village level to support community development.Over the past seven years, the government's village fund allocation has grown rapidly. Village fund allocation stood at Rp20.8 trillion in 2015 and tripled to Rp72 trillion by 2020/2021//ANT