In this interview, Scott Guggenheim, as a founding party of the Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), details the program’s background and the measures taken to initiate its implementation in Indonesia. He discusses how there was a need for a program in the country that created greater local accountability. Seen through the failure of the Inpres Desa Tertinggal (IDT) development program, Guggenheim explains how the Suharto government became so corrupt and disorganized that no money was going to make its way from the top down to the bottom. Thus, a solution to this problem of corruption would be the distribution of funds directly to the villages in order to eliminate the middlemen who often siphoned off the money. This solution served as the foundation of the Kecamatan Development Program. Guggenheim emphasizes the importance of having an effective and simple disbursement system, to assure that money would be dispersed directly to the communities. Therefore, he states how grateful the designing team was to the National Development Planning Agency (BAPPENAS) who worked out how to make the financing aspect of the project function. The simple design of the KDP that was developed is a facilitative planning system mapped against a disbursement system. There is a direct transfer that does not go through the government, but down to the sub-district. That sub-district allocation gets mapped against village level plans that are prioritized by the villagers. The money is given to the projects in the order that they are ranked in until the money runs out.

He discusses how in 1997, they launched the pilot program of KDP, applying their system to twelve sub-districts. He explains the trepidation in scaling up the program, which was due to the uncertainty as to whether the increase in size would make it vulnerable for corruption. Nevertheless, KDP scaled up to 250 villages in the following year, and Guggenheim talks about the components of the program that stayed constant and that needed to be altered in order for the program to thrive.  One of the components that led to KDP’s success was the microfinance, which allowed for the money to reach the poorest people of the villages. Furthermore, the fact that the KDP was a community run organization, and that each village was responsible for their individual funds, makes it so they felt local ownership over the money.  It was their responsibility if projects failed within their community.