Kartu Prakerja — Indonesia's Pre-Employment Card

Kartu Prakerja (Pre-Employment Card) was created by Presidential Regulation (Perpres) No. 36/2020, signed by President Joko Widodo in February 2020 and launched publicly in March-April 2020 as part of Indonesia's COVID-19 response. It is governed by the Komite Cipta Kerja, chaired by the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, and implemented by the Manajemen Pelaksana Program Kartu Prakerja (MPPKP), seated within the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs in Jakarta. It is a national programme distributed by provincial quota across all 34 provinces and 514 districts/cities — Jakarta itself accounts for roughly 7% of beneficiaries, the third-highest of any province, but has no special administrative role beyond hosting the coordinating body's headquarters. Eligible job seekers, laid-off workers and workers needing upskilling receive a training voucher to buy a course from a marketplace of accredited digital platforms, plus post-training cash incentives.

In its first year (2020) the programme enrolled 6.1 million people, paid incentives to 5.3 million, and disbursed Rp13.35 trillion. Cumulative reach passed 18.36 million people by October 2023 and roughly 18.9-19 million by late 2024, with total incentives disbursed reaching Rp41.59 trillion (about US$2.66 billion) through September 2024. Confirmed annual budgets fell sharply as the pandemic-era "social assistance" framing wound down: Rp17.99 trillion in 2022, Rp5.34 trillion in 2023, and roughly Rp5 trillion for 2024, targeting only about 1.15 million beneficiaries that year — a large scale-back from the pandemic peak.

The programme's most methodologically rigorous evaluation is a randomized controlled trial by Rema Hanna (Harvard), Benjamin Olken (MIT) and Indonesian co-authors, using 20 real enrollment lotteries covering more than 11 million applicants and matching survey data to government administrative records; it is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (accepted 2025). Its central finding is sobering: many beneficiaries reported not actually receiving the assistance, and the study found no detectable impact on employment or consumption. This directly supersedes an earlier, widely circulated 2021 "preliminary findings" readout (J-PAL Southeast Asia / TNP2K, based on a 2021 endline survey, never peer-reviewed) that had claimed large gains — roughly +30% likelihood of starting a business and +Rp122,500 in monthly income — figures still cited in some programme promotional material. Weaker, non-experimental studies using propensity-score matching report mixed secondary effects, including increased likelihood of informal "gig work" but reduced earnings among that group.

In June 2020 Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) found conflicts of interest at 5 of the 8 digital training platforms appointed without standard procurement tender, including cases where a platform's own subsidiary supplied a large share of its paid courses, and found only 250 of 1,895 reviewed courses met basic online-training standards. Two presidential special staffers — Adamas Belva Devara (co-founder of training partner Ruangguru) and Andi Taufan Garuda Putra (CEO of Amartha) — resigned in April 2020 amid the ensuing controversy. Subsequent state audits (BPK) found Rp390 billion paid to since-blacklisted participants and Rp290 billion misdirected to ineligible, above-income participants; a further 2024 BPK review found 54,856 ineligible participants and Rp10.46 billion in unwarranted disbursements from inadequate attendance monitoring. Audit bodies KPK, BPK and BPKP declared the programme "clean and clear" in 2021 after recommended fixes were implemented.

Read the full analysis: https://www.prakerja.go.id/