Village Law: Technical Evaluation of Infrastructure Built with Village Funds 2018 (Indonesia)

Abstract

The Village Law, enacted in 2014, mandated the transfer of funds to villages with the goals of reducing poverty and improving living standards in villages through village-led development and community empowerment. Village Law (VL) builds on Indonesia’s 17-year history of participatory and community-driven development (CDD) approaches such as under the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) and Program Nasional Permberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM). The changes consequent upon the closing down of PNPM and its replacement by Village Law transfers (Dana Desa and Alokasi Dana Desa) and implementation arrangements, form a critical backdrop to the report titled: Indonesia Village Law: Technical Evaluation of Infrastructure Built with Village Funds.

The Technical Evaluation of Village Infrastructure evaluates the development process, quality, costs, and operations and maintenance (O&M) of 168 village infrastructure projects (VIPs) with budgets greater than USD 10,000, from 39 villages in six provinces. The five types of projects assessed were: A) buildings (33); B) bridges (15); C) water supply (14); D) roads and drainage (94); and E) irrigation (12). Assessors evaluated the physical structures and related files (budgets, design, approvals, etc.) implementation methods, and operations and maintenance (O&M) procedures. The technical evaluation covers VIPs in the same provinces as in 2012 under the PMPN program.

This collection of data is comprised of audit results from seven field tools, plus one administrative data file. The technical evaluation team collected data on five types of infrastructure projects, with total observations at 168, as described above. The seven field tools are included in this data deposit, for reference. Data were originally collected and assembled as eight data files; one for administrative data and one for each of the seven field tools. The technical evaluation team stored data primarily in binary format, using hundreds of variables per field tool to accommodate the options available for each question within each of the field tools. These data were reorganized into five data sets, one for each infrastructure type (compare to one for each field tool). The data were also consolidated from many sets of binary variables to encoded numeric variables, where applicable, for efficiency. Responses to open-ended questions were left as string variables. Responses to simple yes/no questions were left as binary numeric variables. The public versions of the datasets included here exclude variables containing PII, including: (1) name of infrastructure project inspector; (2) name or firm of infrastructure project design consultant; (3) narrative description of infrastructure project, in Indonesian; and (4) narrative description of infrastructure project, in English. Total infrastructure variables sum to 736 across all five datasets. All variables are named logically and include descriptions in their labels.