Education for women effective population control

Education for women effective population control

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Sitting in her office high above the hustle and bustle of Jl.
Jend. Sudirman, Rima said that her life was too full to bother
with men and family.

"Of course I want a husband and children, but later. Right now
I'm more concerned with getting a master's degree in economics,"
the 28 year-old accountant said.

In fact, more and more women in Indonesia are following in the
footsteps of Rima, delaying marriage and pregnancy for higher
education and a career.

Statistics show that Indonesian women are increasingly
marrying older, with the rate dropping to 0.4 percent for married
10 to 14 year-olds in 1990 compared to 1.8 percent in 1971.

Marriage between 15 to 19 year-olds also dropped down to 22
percent in 1990 from 22.2 percent in 1971, and those between the
age of 20 and 24 to 70.5 percent in 1990 from 73.2 percent two
decades before.

"Higher education and opportunities for a career cause many
women to delay marriage, in effect they also delay their
pregnancy and have less children," sociologist and women's rights
activist Mayling Oey-Gardiner told The Jakarta Post.

Previously, the government-sponsored family planning program
-- initiated in 1970 -- was hailed as the generator behind the
success of suppressing this growth, now education and the
empowerment of women are increasingly recognized as the major
contributing factors.

As a result, the growth rate here went down to 1.2 percent
annually from 2.31 percent between 1971 and 1980, according to
the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS).

As educated women become mothers, they also expect their
children to be educated, making women calculate the costs of
raising them and in the end opt for fewer children, Mayling said.

"Thirty years ago people still questioned why women should get
higher education if, in the end, they would just work in the
kitchen. This is no longer the case, because the mothers now are
also more educated," she said.

Marriage, too, did not necessarily mean early childbearing,
according to demographer Terence H. Hull from the Australian
National University.

"This is because the initiation of a career competed with
motherhood," he states in his paper for the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA) published over the Internet.

Indonesian women now have 2.8 children on average compared to
5.9 in the 1960s, and according to Hull, girls who began school
in 2000 will only have 1.6 children on average over the course of
their reproductive years.

So it would seem that the danger of a population explosion,
much feared in the early 1960s, will be averted after all, at
least in Indonesia, experts say.

Hull said that Indonesia was well past the halfway point in
the transition from high to low fertility.

"There is every indication that the decline in family sizes
will continue, barring the catastrophic worsening of the current
political malaise such that the factors affecting the supply and
demand of children are dramatically changed," he said.

However, we should not sigh with relief just yet, because
although growth rates have slowed, the size of the population
nearly doubled to 203 million in 2000 from 119 million in 1971.
Even with the lower growth rate of 1.2 percent, it still means an
addition of more than 2.4 million people each year.

It should also be noted that the population of adolescents in
Indonesia has grown, the bulk of the 0 to 4 year-olds in the
population pyramid in the 1980s have now moved to the
reproductive ages of 20 to 24.

This, and the new entrants of 15 to 20 year-olds will push the
reproductive population of Indonesia to more than 40 million
people.

So now, more than ever, women's education is crucial to
sustaining the low level of population growth rate, Mayling said.

Women's participation in education has been increasing over
the years, where only around half of 10 to 14 year-old girls were
able to go to school in 1970, four out of five were studying in
1990, Hull said.

The rate of females in secondary and tertiary education
however, leaves much to be desired despite obvious improvements
over the last decade.

Gross enrollment ratios of females at the secondary and
tertiary levels rose from 23 percent and 35 percent to 41 percent
and 50 percent respectively between 1980 and 1996, and the mean
years of schooling for females rose to 6.1 years in 1999 from 4.7
years in 1990, according to BPS.

"While there might be ambitions to continue schooling, there
were barriers in either availability of places, or cost of
enrollment," Hull said.

The cost aspect became even more prominent during the crisis
of 1998 when dropout rates at primary and secondary schools was
3.4 percent, while 19.3 percent of all students could not
continue to a higher level of education, according to the
national socio-economic survey in 2000.

Hull explained the danger, saying that each woman who fails to
progress to higher levels of education risks having parents
consider marriage as an alternative future.

"In such situations, elite Indonesians fear that poor women
will simply retreat to childbearing to put meaning in their
lives," he added.

Mayling, however, said that there was little danger for the
population growth to increase to past levels, saying that
Indonesia had moved away from the notion that 'children bring
their own fortunes', as the Javanese saying goes.

"Parents want their children to be better than them. They will
invest in their children; for school, health. They are now more
prudent about having many children," she said.

In Rima's case, her ambition for a higher education gave her
strong arguments for delaying marriage and children when she
discussed it with her parents.

"Sure, they want to have grandchildren, they've been pushing
me to marry for a long time. But they also understand that my
career comes first".