Educator wants new ministry for child welfare

JAKARTA (JP): An educator of child workers and street children has suggested that a ministry for child welfare be established to avoid continued abuse of impoverished children.

A state minister would coordinate programs better than the current handling of children's welfare by several ministries, Roostien Ilyas said yesterday, after a visit to one of her centers for children working in the Kramat Jati market, East Jakarta.

The center in the local youth organization building provides two hours of study in the morning for around 20 children five times a week. They are five to 17 years old.

The children, whose parents work in the market, also earn between Rp 3,000 (US$1.3) and Rp 21,000 a day at jobs like sorting chili and fruit for supermarkets, or carrying loads.

"It's as if children's programs were only project-oriented," Roostien said, while important issues like the bill on child labor remains unsettled. In colloquial Indonesian project could mean financial profit.

Roostien, who chairs the Nanda Dian Nusantara foundation, said without changes in the law, basic rights like education remain weak for child workers.

She estimated Jakarta has at least 20,000 uneducated children on its streets or in workplaces.

"So far the nine-year compulsory basic education program is hit-and-miss without supporting methods," Roostien told The Jakarta Post after receiving guests from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the foundation's donors.

She said while basic education is compulsory, it is not enforced by picking up street children and schooling them.

"The market children here are an impact of the absence of such measures," Roostien said.

While most parents agree to have their children educated, some punish their children when the youngsters fail to deliver their daily share of the family's income.

"The relationship between children and their elders is sometimes exploitative," she said. Both natural children and those adopted from early ages for begging are obliged to "pay back" their elders, she added.

A special minister for child welfare would be able to better incorporate such problems in policies like compulsory education, she said.

The foundation's project leader, Firman Hidayat, said he and the volunteers are still struggling with the ways of the children, though after three years they said there is much progress.

Up to Rp 60,000 from a week's hard work can be spent on weekends playing video games at the nearby Kramat Jati Indah shopping center, Firman said.

Among the children is a widow of 15 and a bridegroom and his bride-to-be of almost the same age.

Another teenager had earlier commented that in the market, it is usual to find unmarried mothers, who either raise or abort their children.

"Worrying about having no husband is just a rich person's anxiety, not ours," she said, as quoted by a volunteer.

Stephen Grant, the head of education and training at USAID, said programs such as those run by the foundation are important as the government cannot reach out to all children who need education. (anr)