Desa Ramah Perempuan dan Peduli Anak (DRPPA) — Indonesia's Women- and Child-Friendly Village Programme

Launched by Indonesia's Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection (Kemen PPPA) in November 2020 with 138 pilot villages across 71 districts and cities, the Desa Ramah Perempuan dan Peduli Anak (DRPPA — Women- and Child-Friendly Village) programme asks villages to adopt local regulations embedding gender and child-rights criteria into planning and budgeting, establish services for cases of violence, promote women's entrepreneurship, and increase women's presence in village deliberative bodies. It responds to national baseline data showing just 3,886 female village heads nationwide at launch, in a country where roughly 43% of the population lives in villages.
Implementation is led locally by 'Perempuan Perintis' (pioneering women, often wives of village heads) and volunteer cadres, with provincial governments running their own monitoring visits against a set of indicators later folded into Indonesia's national Village SDGs framework. In July 2025, UNICEF co-launched pilot women- and child-friendly villages in Southwest Papua alongside local government and community health cadres, indicating adoption of the model beyond the originating ministry.
By the ministry's own count, DRPPA had grown to 1,967 committed villages and sub-villages nationwide by April 2024. However, no rigorous, independent, population-level impact evaluation (e.g. measured before/after violence or child-marriage rates) was found. Two independent Indonesian academic studies instead document mixed results: a 2024 Diponegoro University thesis comparing two Purbalingga villages found one succeeded through strong local coordination while a neighbouring village struggled with limited resources and low community participation; a 2025 study in Jurnal Good Governance found that even in Denpasar, four years after launch, villages still lacked uniform implementation guidelines and adequate resourcing. The scale and institutional durability of DRPPA are well documented; its on-the-ground effectiveness is honestly mixed according to independent researchers.

Read the full analysis: https://kemenpppa.go.id/siaran-pers/perempuan-perintis-penggerak-desa-ramah-perempuan-dan-peduli-anak-drppa