President Jokowi’s Decade of Success in Advancing the Nation Through Infrastructure Development
By: Nana Gunawan *)
Over the past 10 years, President Joko Widodo has successfully advanced Indonesia. Infrastructure development has become the main focus of the Government for connectivity, basic services, food, energy, and industrial needs. President Jokowi also emphasized the importance of infrastructure development not only to build physically but also to provide long-term benefits for people throughout Indonesia.
Various infrastructure developments have been carried out by President Jokowi, ranging from transportation, dams, to the Nusantara National Capital (IKN) project. The government’s involvement in advancing this sector has become the key to driving sustainable economic growth.
In recent years, a series of infrastructure projects have created positive impacts on various aspects of people’s lives and national economic growth, such as better access in various regions, increasing regional competitiveness, attracting private sector investment, and creating new jobs.
FISIP lecturer from Bung Karno University, Faisyal Chaniago said that Indonesia is an archipelagic country consisting of 17,000 islands. This certainly requires very fast connectivity. Therefore, various steps have been taken by President Jokowi to connect each region in Indonesia by developing infrastructure. During the 10 years of President Jokowi’s leadership, he has built toll roads, roads in rural and urban areas in each province very well. From the archipelago side, President Jokowi has also built around 50 new ports to connect between islands throughout Indonesia.
The completion of these infrastructure projects has a positive impact on economic growth both nationally and regionally. For road infrastructure, 7,800 kilometers (km) have been successfully built, namely 2,094 km of toll roads and 5,833 km of national roads. Then, there are also 25 new airports built during his term of office. Meanwhile, the most proud public transportation infrastructure is the construction of new transportation modes such as the Jakarta-Bandung Whoosh Fast Train, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), and Light Rapid Transit (LRT). In addition, there are also 42 dams built during his 10-year term of office with an initial target of 60 dams planned to be built.
Faisyal Chaniago emphasized that the goal of President Jokowi’s massive development is to equalize economic growth across all regions in Indonesia. According to him, economic growth does not only occur in big cities like Jakarta, but must also occur in other regions. Another positive impact is the decrease in production costs which will automatically reduce the cost of goods. That way, indirectly the cost of living for the community will also decrease.
Indonesia’s economic growth continues to be accelerated in line with efforts to improve people’s welfare. The economy that continues to record sustainable growth is balanced by an increase in people’s welfare. When the level of people’s welfare improves, Indonesian Human Resources (HR) will also be increasingly able to contribute to domestic economic development and growth. Therefore, the Indonesian Government under the leadership of President Jokowi has made efforts to grow the national economy and improve people’s welfare through massive infrastructure development.
These efforts have an impact on opening new job opportunities, improving the quality and excellence of human resources, reducing poverty levels, increasing empowerment and increasing access to capital for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), establishing policies that support downstreaming, and increasing investment attractiveness. According to Faisyal Chaniago, every region has the same right to enjoy development. Thus, new roads such as Trans Papua, Trans Sumatra, to Trans Kalimantan were born as well as development in other fields so that it has an impact on equitable development whose benefits can be felt by all elements of society. This can also have an impact on the elimination of social jealousy in other regions.
It must also be acknowledged that President Jokowi has indeed been able to maintain economic stability above five percent, even higher than the global growth average of only 3.4 percent. In the 10 years of Jokowi’s administration, indicators of public welfare have also increased. This is evidenced by the decline in the poverty rate to 9.03 percent in 2024 and the extreme poverty rate also dropped significantly to 0.83 in 2024. In the same year, the unemployment rate also fell to 4.8 percent and jobs increased by 21.3 million during the 10 years of President Jokowi’s administration.
Then, he hopes that with the massive infrastructure development carried out by President Jokowi, the target of Indonesia Emas in 2045 can be achieved so that the country of Indonesia does not experience decline. In the future, economic growth and community development must continue to be accelerated through the optimization of all domestic resources in order to attract investment support to realize an advanced Indonesia for a more productive and prosperous community life.
*) The author is a political observer at the Nusa Bangsa Institute.
