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".