Family planning board hesitant to go local

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.