The province of Aceh has made impressive strides towards recovery and rehabilitation in the past decade. The devastating tsunami of 2004 and the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government capped decades of violence and unrest that left Aceh as one of the poorest provinces in Indonesia. The post-conflict period has seen the political space open under the special autonomy granted to Aceh to combat long-running economic problems and high rates of poverty. The province’s rates of poverty and unemployment nevertheless remain above the national average. In particular, the poor in Aceh’s villages (known in Acehnese as gampong) have been relatively left behind, even as economic growth has reduced poverty rates in the province’s urban areas. The Government of Aceh has implemented its own version of the National Program for Community Empowerment (PNPM), the nationwide program aimed at poverty reduction and community-driven development. The Village Financial Assistance Program (Bantuan Keuangan Peumakmu Gampong, BKPG) began in 2009. Through the BKPG program, the Government of Aceh intends to accelerate development and poverty reduction while strengthening the capacity of village governments to deliver needed services. The program is financed through the Special Autonomy fund granted to Aceh as part of the 2005 peace agreement; since 2007, Aceh has received additional revenue from special autonomy funds and revenues from the oil and gas sector in the province. In the period of 2007-2012, BKPG disbursed over 1.5 trillion rupiah (around $120 million USD) for a wide variety of activities, with a focus on village infrastructure improvements, savings and loans activities for women’s groups, education and health programs, and the strengthening of village government. In 2013, 70 million rupiah were allocated for each of 6,464 villages in the province. Unlike the national version of PNPM, BKPG provides the same financial allocation for each village in Aceh. In order to evaluate the performance of BKPG, SurveyMeter in collaboration with PSF/CPDA conducted a survey in 2013. The survey was conducted with the aim of assessing program utilization, the overall effectiveness of the program, and the perceptions of Acehnese villagers of the program. Six hundred households were selected using a cluster sampling method from twenty households in 30 villages in Aceh.
