Strengthening Village Information Governance: An Integrated Community Engagement Programme

Abstract

Indonesian villages now administer substantial public funds and operate their own enterprises, yet the information on which accountability depends is often missing, fragmented or inaccessible. Community engagement responses typically address a single domain and report what was delivered rather than what changed. This programme took the opposite approach in Allakuang, a village in Sidenreng Rappang Regency, South Sulawesi, between December 2025 and February 2026. Its purpose was to test whether several linked interventions, delivered to one village within a single cycle, could shift the village from an information-poor to an information-legible condition. A participatory action design moved from a household-level needs assessment across five hamlets to five interventions: legal literacy on village fund governance; financial accounting training and mentoring for the village-owned enterprise; household organic waste composting; an integrated village profile published on a public website; and digital tourism information with printed QR access points. Attainment was evaluated as verified change in information status rather than as test scores, with physical artefacts and photographic records as evidence. The clearest result came from the village-owned enterprise, whose accounts had not been compiled for a year and were reconstructed in full for 2024 and 2025, after which officers prepared a monthly report without assistance. Legal literacy reached 32 participants and composting 20. The programme shows that bounded partners with defined duties change faster than diffuse audiences, and that information artefacts outlast the engagement that produced them.

Keywords

• village information governance
• accountability
• village-owned enterprise
• rural digitalisation
• participatory action research