At the tabling of Bajet 2023 earlier today, Finance Minister Tengku Zafrul announced that the ePemula program for youths will be making a return. While the program will continue to provide free e-wallet credit, the amount that eligible individuals will receive has been changed though.
Specifically, they will be provided with an e-wallet credit of RM200. As a comparison, those who were eligible for the original ePemula program earlier this year received RM150 per person.
Not only that, the amount that will be provided for 2023’s ePemula is two times higher than what the government has planned for the new ePemula M40 program which was also revealed during today’s Bajet 2023 session.
Similar to this year’s edition, the free e-wallet credit under the ePemula 2023 will be distributed to youth aged 18 to 20 years old. In addition to that, the benefit will be made available to full-time students aged 21 years and beyond.
Given the increased amount of credits that will be provided by this year’s program, the same applies to its cost as well. While the original implementation involved RM300 million, the government is allocating a higher budget of RM 400 million for the ePemula 2023.
However, Tengku Zafrul did not provide any in-depth detail regarding the program during his Bajet 2023’s speech. There was no mention of a rollout date or official e-wallet list although, given the vast amount of things that he covered during the speech, this does not come as a surprise.
If you need a comparison though, it took around five months for the Ministry of Finance to reveal the official list of ePemula’s official e-wallets earlier this year. The rollout eventually took place on 11 April via four e-wallet services including BigPay, GrabPay, ShopeePay, and Touch n Go eWallet.
Hence, you can expect to hear more about the ePemula 2023 as well as the related ePemula M40 in months to come.
