Indonesia’s authorities have decided to digitise every street vendor and small shop owner. The Minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Maman Abdurrahman, has presented the Sapa UMKM project. It is a huge digital system designed to manage 57 million entrepreneurs. The scale is impressive: the app will have one and a half times as many users as Canada’s entire population.
The minister acknowledged that the old ways of working are no longer suitable. Manually overseeing this many business owners is simply impossible. Only a super-app can help, and it is now in the final stage of development. Everything will be brought together in one system: from obtaining licences to bank loans and access to government tenders. The platform is expected to cut through bureaucracy. This is especially important for small companies, which often cannot quickly secure funding to grow.
Sapa UMKM will become a single service hub for the UMKM sector — the term used in Indonesia for micro, small and medium-sized businesses. The country already has more than 50 million such enterprises, and in the coming years, economists forecast the figure will reach around 57 million. This sector is seen as the backbone of the national economy, so the authorities are trying to build more structured support.
The platform will work as a smart hub with a profile for each entrepreneur. Officials will be able to see which courses a business owner has completed and what their company is missing in order to grow. The app will replace costly paper surveys and give the authorities access to real-time data.
The system will also include a B2B marketplace for direct trade with state-owned corporations and major private companies. The minister is confident that this integration will help local products reach global markets and enable entrepreneurs to expand their sales channels.
Once the app is ready, every entrepreneur will need to register in the system. Given the number of business owners in Indonesia, the rollout will be phased so the system does not crash under the influx of users and businesses have time to adapt smoothly to the new digital infrastructure.
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