Exclusive: Education receives most citizen complaints in Indonesia

The top complaint Indonesia’s government receives from citizens is about the quality of education, GovInsider has learned.

A planned new dashboard - seen by GI - lists complaints by category and will soon be launched to the general public. The next greatest cause of complaints was transport infrastructure, bureaucratic reform, industry, and health.

The dashboard will let citizens create maps and charts from complaints on Twitter and the government’s complaints-handling channel, Lapor. These can help them monitor the current quality of government services, and understand where it needs to improve. It will also offer a more granular analysis of actual keywords used in the complaints.

The most popular keyword is “Sekolah” (school), which has 872,531 more complaints than the next keyword - “Universitas” (university). This could indicate that even within education, schools are a much bigger concern than universities.

The project is a collaboration between the Office of Presidential Staff, Ministry of National Development Planning, and Pulse Lab Jakarta, said Gibran Sesunan, Associate Director at the President’s office. President Joko Widodo has this year made Lapor a “national priority”, which means that he will be monitoring the project’s results, Sesunan said.

The project is run directly by his office, and will this year be handed over to a ministry for faster implementation. The project will be taken over by the Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform, which is responsible for improving public services.

“It’s also a way to push Menpan [the ministry] to make the national implementation better and faster,” Sesunan said.

The ministry will set up a separate unit to run the complaints service, coordinate across ministries to address complaints, and promote the service to citizens, Sesunan said.

The President’s office will continue monitoring the project, and report results to the President every three months, he added.