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INDONESIA PASSES TEST TO RECEIVE MILLIONS IN GRANTS FROM US AGENCY
JAKARTA GLOBE, 04/23/2009
A US government aid agency has launched the first phase of its latest bilateral partnership, worth millions of dollars, with Indonesia, an agency chief said on Thursday.
Indonesia has been chosen as one of 26 countries to receive a multimillion-dollar compact grant from the US Millennium Challenge Corporation, said Darius Teter, deputy vice president of the agency’s development division. “It’s called compact because it covers several important issues in a country,” Teter said.
The MCC is a government-funded program that focuses on helping lower-income countries reduce poverty through sustainable economic growth. “We selected Indonesia because the country has passed several indicators, all of which were judged by independent institutions,” Teter said.
The indicators included health, economy, good governance, immunization rates, education levels for girls, natural resource management and the control of corruption. Teter said the agreement would start by the end of 2010 and last for five years but would not disclose the amount that would be granted. “Our policy is to give a number of grants according to the country’s proposal,” he said, “and we leave the funds to the partner country for the management.”
Prasetijono Joedo, who heads the division of poverty, manpower and small businesses at the National Development Planning Board, or Bappenas, said that as the first step of the partnership, the government would form a national team to assess the
projects.
“We will determine which projects the grant will be allocated to,” he said, adding that the funds may be allotted to projects that could provide better access to education and small businesses, as well as family-planning programs. To ensure accountability, Teter said, every stage of the projects would be published on the MCC’s Web site. “We also put our independent team in place to supervise the projects,” Teter said.
Kennedy Simanjuntak, director of bilateral foreign funding at Bappenas, said that regardless of the amount, the grant shows “recognition from an international institution of Indonesia’s reform, especially in regards to the control of corruption indicators.”
Formed in 2004, MCC is currently assisting 18 lower income countries in Asia, South America and Africa with grants. Morocco and Tanzania are their biggest recipients, with $700 million donated to each country in 2007.
In October 2006, MCC granted Indonesia $55 million in their smaller-scale, two-year program addressing weaknesses in the immunization rates and control of corruption in the country.
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