BKKBN chief turns dream into reality

BKKBN chief turns dream into reality

By Santi WE Soekanto

JAKARTA (JP): The Asian Management Award trophy presented
recently to Chairman of National Family Planning Coordinating
Board (BKKBN) Haryono Suyono is inscribed with the scrolled motto
Plus Ultra, signifying that "there is more beyond and more to
achieve."

The award also bears the symbol of the globe, illustrating the
new breed of managers needed for Asian organizations in the 1990s
and beyond, managers who are truly global managers.

The fact that BKKBN won the award, along with other
international honors Indonesia has received in the last decade
for its family planning success, is indicative of Haryono's
management skills. He is the man behind the great number of the
agency's concepts, which he said started with "a dream."

"People accused me of dreaming when I first prepared the
concept of how to spread the family planning movement
nationwide," he told The Jakarta Post recently. "But that's all
right because I like to bring dreams into reality."

Granted, critics have long lists of gripes to hold over BKKBN
methods ever since the inception of the family planning movement
in the early 1970s. One midwife in Bandung, West Java, for
instance, tells of how she had to bring along local military
officers to browbeat villagers into letting their wives be
"inserted" with birth control devices.

A doctor in Jakarta described the previous heinous practice of
compelling women to join family planning during the ABRI Masuk
Desa (the Armed Forces rural improvement programs). Coercion was
the usual practice of family planning program in its earliest
stages, something which critics have decried many times.

Even Haryono Suyono admitted in a previous interview that such
"side effects" were rampant at that time and could not always be
controlled.

"But that was then," he said. "The government has since
surrendered the responsibility of family planing and birth
spacing to the hands of the public themselves."

"Now, people buy their own contraceptives," he added.

Indeed there have been changes for the better, as indicated by
the decline in the national fertility rate and the greater
accessibility to centers for family planning services and
information.

According to official records, the government has reduced the
country's fertility rate from 5.605 in 1969 to today's 3.022
children per family. The government wants the rate to drop even
further, to an annual 2.6 percent by the end of the sixth Five-
Year Development Plan in 1999.

In spite of various difficulties, including initial
resistance from religious groups who believed that birth control
violated their faith, the nation also managed to reduce
population growth from a potentially unsupportable 2.3 percent a
year between 1971 and 1980 to 1.97 percent annually the following
decade.

Indonesia's population, which stood at 120 million in 1969,
now reaches 189 million.

This is not to say that all is well; the United Nations'
Children's Fund (Unicef), for instance, still deplores the high
maternal mortality rates here, especially in the least-developed
eastern provinces. In addition, it is reported that coercion has
not exactly been wiped out, especially in the outer islands.

For the moment, however, the Indonesian board of judges for
the Asian Management Awards Year IV, has decided that the hard
work of Haryono and his colleagues deserved plaudits.

The judges -- Rachmat Saleh, John A. Prasetio, Djunaedi
Hadisumarto and H. Surasa -- chose BKKBN and five other
organizations from the 301 nominations this year.

Community approach

Haryono, whose tireless efforts were rewarded when President
Soeharto appointed him State Minister of Population last March,
says his agency has always adopted a management strategy which
employs the "community approach."

The holder of a doctoral degree in social changes says the
outreach units for family planning service are not the clinics or
health centers, but the total group of people around them.

He believes that BKKBN won mostly because the government is
committed to the program, and envisioned not only the reduction
of population growth but also the dream of establishing "small,
happy and prosperous" families.

With such a commitment, the agency has succeeded in mobilizing
many resources in society, "from religious leaders, legal
experts, doctors and members of other professions to spread the
message of family planning," he says.

"This feature is nonexistent in other organizations. This is
also one of the reasons why over 2,000 foreign experts have come
to Indonesia to study the program."

In addition to up-to-date information collection and
dissemination, BKKBN also manages its logistics on a demand-
fulfillment basis. Supplies of contraceptives, for instance, are
sent promptly upon demand and the BKKBN branch offices report on
the trend of contraception in the region.

With the system, the agency has been able to cut the response
time to 20 days.

"This is no small feat, considering the fact that Indonesia is
an archipelagic country with thousands of islands," Haryono says.
He attributes this success to some 1,000 employees of the BKKBN
central office and thousands of others in the branch offices.

Training

BKKBN currently serves around 25 million people annually
through its vast network of one million family planning clinics
which are were manned by expert service givers.

Haryono says the agency applies the "continuous training
system" which is adjusted to meet demand. For instance, in the
initial stage, midwives, paramedics and doctors were trained to
only insert or plant contraceptives. They were trained to pull
out the devices several years later, when demand for such a
service began.

"So, at one stage, all that these doctors did was insert,
insert, insert..." Haryono said laughingly. "Actually, we had to
take such an approach because of the limited number of facilities
and personnel."

"In other words, we managed the program in accordance with
existing limitations," he added.

In the early stages, BKKBN had only 7,000 clinics and 8,000
midwives deployed to give family planning service. There are over
60,000 villages in the 17,000 islands of the archipelago.

BKKBN trained the doctors and paramedics for about three weeks
in certain family planning techniques, deployed them in various
parts of the country, and retrained them again after two years.

With such a "continuous system," within 20 years the doctors
became such experts that foreign doctors from countries such as
England admired their work, Haryono claimed.

"You can't help becoming an expert after inserting IUD (intra-
uterine devices) in thousands of women," Haryono added.

"I call the whole affair management through vision," Haryono
concluded. "I project the dreams into actions, building
commitments and partnerships with as many people as possible."

This "projection of a dream" has made BKKBN the first non-
profit organization to ever win the Asian Management Award twice.
In 1992 it received the Development Management category award,
and this year it captured the Operations Management award.