The Red And White Kopdes Program Needs To Be Experimented And Pilot Projects

Rupiah (Photo: Antara)

JAKARTA - Economist and lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Paramadina University Muhammad Iksan reminded the government not to rush into running the Red and White Village Cooperative program, but to focus on pilot experiments and projects rather than pursuing ambitious target numbers.

This approach allows evaluation and improvement of programs according to real conditions on the ground.

Iksan said an over-massive approach without careful planning has the potential to cause state losses. He reminded the problem of irregularities in funds that had occurred in the village fund program.

"It's better to be late than lose," said Iksan quoting Antara.

Furthermore, Iksan explained several crucial problems that need to be considered in the Red and White Village Cooperative program.

He highlighted that the formation of cooperatives that were pushed from top to bottom (top-down) was not in line with the essence of cooperatives as a bottom-up and autonomous people's economic movement, as regulated in Law Number 25 of 1992.

According to him, the top-down approach risks making cooperatives independent and vulnerable to external intervention.

With the target of forming a new cooperative that is very large and ambitious, as well as the desire to get a profit soon, the program is considered to ignore the reality of the field too much.

He said the challenges related to governance, risk management, and institutional supervision would be very large, especially if you saw the decrease in the number of previous village unit cooperatives (KUD).

"So there needs to be a possible piloting project without having to rush to produce 80 thousand, but more to experiment, meaning looking at the situation and conditions on the ground," he said.

To date, around 80,500 Cooperatives of Red and White Villages have been formed throughout Indonesia, with 77,000 of them having legal entities from the Ministry of Law.

The 80,000 Kopdes Merah Putih program is planned to be launched directly by President Prabowo Subianto on July 19, 2025 in Klaten, Central Java. Of the tens of thousands of cooperatives, there are 103 cooperatives that are pilot which will also be launched simultaneously by the president on the same date.

Minister of Cooperatives Budi Arie Setiadi said that more than 80 thousand cooperatives are targeted to be fully operational by December 2025, according to the president's wishes.

He denied the assumption that this year's operational focus would only be limited to 103 pilot Kopdes.

"No. The President has already said that the target is that by the end of this year, December 2025, 80 thousand, all of which are already operational," said Budi Arie in Jakarta, Thursday (10/7).