Home Affairs Minister Gathers Regional Heads to Discuss Social Assistance Digitalisation in 43 Cities

Home Affairs Minister Tito Karnavian held a coordination meeting with several regional heads and related ministries and agencies regarding the digitalisation of social assistance (bansos). Tito stated the meeting was aimed at completing the pilot project for digitalising social assistance in 43 districts and cities. “And this is also the precursor to the roadmap towards GovTech or Government Technology Indonesia,” Tito said during the meeting at the Home Affairs Ministry office in Central Jakarta, Tuesday, 30 June 2026.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Committee for the Acceleration of Government Digital Transformation, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, said the digitalisation of social assistance is intended to make the work more efficient and transparent. “This GovTech implementation is, I think, the first to massively use AI in Indonesia,” Luhut stated.

Luhut said the process of selecting social assistance recipients is, for the first time, being carried out transparently and accountably through a cross-sector data exchange system. He mentioned that the system was developed by the Government Technology Indonesia team without purchasing software from abroad, even though Estonia had offered similar software for 500,000 euros. “What this means is that our nation’s children can create it; we do not have to depend on other countries. We can learn from them, but we should not depend on them,” Luhut explained.

The meeting was also attended by the Minister of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform, the Head of the National Cyber and Crypto Agency, representatives from the Ministry of Communication and Digital, and the Head of the Central Statistics Agency. Meanwhile, regional heads attended the meeting via the Zoom application.