Rice for Poor Households

A Value for Money of Australia’ support to Indonesia’s Raskin programme

The Raskin programme - Rice for Poor Households - is a nationally managed distribution of subsidised rice to help poor and low-income families, who can then use the money they save for other needs. The analysis we led focuses on the immediate value of the rice transfers to recipients in terms of those savings. From 2010 to 2013, thanks to the reforms, social targeting improved, from 39% to 54% of funds going to the poor and vulnerable. we thus find that the net value of improvements to the Raskin programme between these two years is A$79 million. Extrapolating this from 2013 to 2017 we calculate the Net Present Value of Australia’s supported reform at AUD 345 million over five years. We conclude that DFAT’s investment of AUD 12.2 million dollars has produced AUD 28 of social welfare for each dollar invested. This highlights a fair return on investment, although much lower than in the other social protection programme reforms that Australia has supported.