Family planning board hesitant to go local

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

"What would you like to do?" a family-planning staff member asked a client in a rural area in Java.

"It's up to you, Sir, whatever you consider fitting," answered the client in refined Javanese.

The above example, advanced by a participant in a discussion here over the weekend, illustrates the submissive attitude of the public toward the authorities.

They will let the government decide something even as private as method of birth control, thanks to what the participant called "militaristic instruction" employed by the Soeharto government in the family planning program.

Not only did it ensure nationwide success of the program, but also compliant clients. But with reform came regional autonomy, which gives more power to regional governments.

According to a presidential decree, government agencies like the National Family Planning Board (BKKBN) not withstanding, will have to relinquish much of their authority to the regions by December 2003.

However, there are many worries about relinquishing centralized programs such as the family planning program to local administrations.

The worries range from concerns of whether family planning will get the proper attention from regional administrations to fears by BKKBN staff members at provincial and regency levels of whether they will still be employed by local administrations.

BKKBN head Yaumil CA Achir confirmed the concerns in the April 27 discussion organized by the Jakarta office of the Johns Hopkins University and The Jakarta Post.

"They have been my nightmares too," she confided.

Should regional administrations be not committed to family planning as they focus more on income-raising policies, she noted, then it would help create a population nightmare for the country.

"Hopefully the circulating opinion that local administrations are only striving for revenue is not true ... if it is, then it will worsen family planning and other social services. As a consequence, the quality of our human resources will decrease and burden our efforts to alleviate poverty."

How compliant will the regents be to Jakarta is still open to question.

Legislator Surya Chandra Surapaty, who was one of the speakers at the discussion, talked about certain regents who no longer felt they needed to ask for permission from their superiors, in this case the governors, to travel abroad.

The regents could just as easily fail to execute the family planning program, said Surya.

If the family planning program is put aside by local administrations, a population explosion could happen any time soon, considering the huge number of women entering their productive years.

Assuming that the country's population growth stays at the current rate of 1.35 percent per annum, Indonesia's population would double to 412 million people in 2034.

Because of such concerns, Yaumil said her agency might not delegate all of its power to the regions, hinting that it is likely to retain its advocacy, information, education and communication roles.

"I'm convinced that the achievement of the agency is here to stay," Yaumil said.

The family planning program has been around in Indonesia since the early period of the New Order administration under former president Soeharto.

The program is considered one of Indonesia's success stories under Soeharto.

The program drastically cut the birth rate to 2.8 children per mother in 1997 from 5.6 children in the 1970s.

Since 1979, the program has expanded to cover not only efforts to control population growth but also those to improve the quality of a family's economic life as well as the quality of human resources.

At least 95 countries, mainly developing countries, have initiated similar programs using Indonesia's experience as their role model.

However, critics have said that the success of the family planning program under the New Order government could not be separated from government's coercive measures in implementing the program.

The success of a governor, a regent, a subdistrict head and even a village head would be measured by, among other things, their success in recruiting families to take part in the government-sponsored family planning program.

Many women in that period were reportedly forced to use contraceptives without being given sufficient information about their effects on their bodies and health.

Woman activist Sita Aripunarmi said the centralistic approach on family planning had often neglected client's rights. Therefore, she welcomed the decentralization of the family planning program so that the local administrations and local people would be more actively involved in the program.

"Each region is unique ... they have their own way to promote family planning, and locally customized programs will likely be more readily accepted by locals than a centralized one," she remarked.

Worries surrounding decentralization of the family planning program combined with passive family planning clients certainly looks like a real challenge for the government in maintaining the success story of the program.