Tracking Impact: Leveraging Pre-existing Monitoring Tools for Assessing Indonesia's Free Nutritious Meal (Makan Bergizi Gratis) Programme

Indonesia’s Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) programme is among the largest school feeding initiatives globally, yet its rapid scale-up has outpaced the development of a robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework capable of assessing welfare-relevant outcomes. This paper examines whether pre-existing national survey instruments can be leveraged to strengthen outcome monitoring in the absence of MBG-specific microdata. Focusing on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) collected through Indonesia’s National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), the study first situates experiential food insecurity within Indonesia’s broader food security landscape. It then applies a propensity score matching framework using participation in the Bantuan Pangan Non-Tunai (BPNT) programme as an illustrative case to assess the responsiveness of FIES to food assistance exposure. The results demonstrate that experiential food insecurity captures dimensions of vulnerability that are not fully reflected in consumption-based indicators. The measure also responds to food and dietary access related interventions. The paper argues that integrating FIES into MBG’s MEL architecture offers a feasible, scalable, and analytically robust approach to monitoring short- to medium-term programme outcomes and supports adaptive implementation of MBG.