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.