Antara News·Indonesia·Wednesday, September 23, 2026 at 08:44 AM

Ministry proposes communal kitchens for MBG in underdeveloped areas

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Tri Meilani, Raka Adji

Jakarta (ANTARA) - Indonesia's Ministry of Villages and Development of Disadvantaged Regions has proposed establishing communal kitchens to support the Free Nutritious Meal (MBG) programme implementation in underdeveloped areas.

The Ministry's Director General of Acceleration of Disadvantaged Regions Development, Samsul Widodo, said the communal kitchen concept could be applied, as residential and school environments in several disadvantaged regions, particularly Papua, differ from those in other parts of the country.

"Setting up a communal kitchen allows locals to learn how to cook meals using local ingredients," he said in Jakarta on Wednesday during an online discussion titled "Accelerating the Implementation of the MBG Programme in Frontier, Underdeveloped, and Outermost Regions".

Widodo further explained that housing clusters in Papua often consist of only 10 to 20 households, with a similarly small number of students per school. Such conditions require an approach to food provision tailored to the community's scale and local supply chain.

In this context, communal kitchens serve as shared facilities where residents can process food while learning to prepare meals from locally sourced ingredients.

According to him, the Ministry of Villages and Development of Disadvantaged Regions has previously adopted a similar concept to teach women how to cook nutritious food through the village kitchen initiative.

He said these village kitchens could be managed by local residents, including women's groups, allowing them to also support efforts to meet local food needs.

Targeting millions of beneficiaries nationwide, the MBG programme was launched in early 2025 as a key programme of President Prabowo Subianto administration to improve the nutritional status of toddlers, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and school-age children.

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