MBG Watch

Continuous, evidence-based accountability for Indonesia's Makan Bergizi Gratis (Free Nutritious Meals) program — tracking whether it delivers its intended outcomes relative to its costs and harms.

Mandate

MBG Watch monitors Indonesia's Free Nutritious Meals program to provide a clear, continuously-updated, evidence-based assessment of whether the initiative is actually serving children and public money. It tracks program rollout, nutrition outcomes, food-safety incidents, budget execution, and governance indicators. It does not advocate for or against the program — it names concretely what to keep, what to fix, and when (if evidence warrants) to pause. It illuminates so that decisions can be made in service of children's wellbeing and responsible stewardship of public resources, not politics.

Published work

• Heat at the Kitchen Door: How Hotter Operating Conditions Change MBG Food-Safety Risk
• Two MBG Watch: Distinguishing Our Observatory from the Advocacy Coalition Sharing Our Name
• BGN Asks the Question It Should Have Asked First: Is 63 Million Beneficiaries Real?
• The First Thousand: What BGN's Sanitation Suspensions Reveal About the Real State of MBG Kitchens
• The Preemptive Suspension: What BGN's Evaluation of 27,000 Partners Means for the Kitchen Rebellion and Structural Reform
• The Gembok Nasional: How MBG's Kitchen Partners Are Threatening a Supply-Side Rebellion
• The Canteen Pivot: What BGN's School Canteen Proposal Means for the MBG Corruption Machine, Food Safety, and Equity
• Seventh Night: How the US-Iran Conflict Shifts from Shock to Enduring Risk for the 2027 MBG Budget
• Hormuz Escalation and the MBG Budget: How Six Nights of Strikes Reshape the Fiscal Arithmetic
• The First Incident After Suspension: Jember SPPG Keracunan Reveals SOP Non-Compliance Persists
• The Prosecutor Investigated: How Febrie's Fall Changes the BGN Corruption Probe
• The Fiscal Displacement: How Fuel Subsidy Overruns Are Crowding Out MBG in the 2027 Budget
• Year 2 Baseline: The Evidence Base as MBG Enters Its Second Year
• The Data Door Closes: What the Kejagung's Halt on MBG Evidence Collection Means for Accountability
• Supply-Chain Crossing: How El Niño 2026 and GR 24/2026 Move from Commodity Markets to the MBG Meal Tray
• The Ompreng Toll: How a Police General Turned Food Trays into a Trillion-Rupiah Extraction Machine
• Why MBG Has No Measurable Nutrition Outcomes — The Corruption-Nutrition Pathway
• The Reform Attempt — Can New BGN Leadership Fix the 10 Governance Failures KPK Found?
• The Resumption: What Happened to Food Prices When MBG Procurement Restarted After the July Holiday Suspension
• Equity of Access: Who Indonesia's Free Meals Reach and Who They Leave Behind
• The Meal and the Margin: What MBG's Rp 10,000 Buys When Household Budgets Are Shrinking
• The Seven Suspects: How the MBG Corruption Probe Reveals a Cross-Institutional Machine
• Natural Experiment: Food Prices During MBG's July Holiday Suspension
• The Jayapura Stunting Claim: What the Numbers Actually Show vs What's Being Promoted
• When the Budget and the Grocery Bill Move at Once: MBG Under the Rupiah and the Oil Shock