Women, democracy vital to human development: Scholars
Women, democracy vital to human development: Scholars
Muhammad Nafik
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Indonesia should nurture its democracy among its fragmented
political elite and give women a wider role in the national
decision-making process in a bid to improve public welfare and
political freedom, scholars have said.
Chusnul Mar'iyah, a lecturer at the University of Indonesia,
said that increasing women's participation in politics would
render the country able to focus on efforts to improve people's
welfare.
Women are underrepresented in the country's political
institutions, which are still dominated by males, she said.
She was responding to a report released on Wednesday by the
United Development Program (UNDP), which said Indonesia was among
the least successful countries for improving the welfare of its
people.
The 2002 Human Development Report puts Indonesia in seventh
place of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN), just above Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
Globally, Indonesia ranks 110 out of 173 countries, just below
Vietnam and above Equatorial Guinea.
The report also suggested that Indonesia and other Asian
nations give women key roles in the government to make further
progress in promoting political freedom.
Chusnul, speaking at a panel discussion after the release of
the report, urged the country's political elite to take the call
seriously to improve the country's human development.
"The government should provide more funds to regions that are
successful in giving women a wider political role, because this
would improve people's well-being," she said.
Women's activists and legislators have been campaigning for a
30 percent quota of legislative seats allotted to women in the
2004 general election.
R. Sudarsan, a senior governance advisor for UNDP in Jakarta,
said that increasing women's political representation in regional
levels would be effective in improving Indonesia's human
development.
Besides women, democracy also plays an important role in
improving public welfare.
To that end, M. Fajrul Falaakh, an academic from Gadjah Mada
University, suggested that Indonesia review its democratic
institutions and political systems to allow democracy to fully
work.
"Our democratic institutional arrangement should include
people in a decision-making process, especially on issues
affecting their life," he said at the same seminar.
Bambang Harymurti, the chief editor of Tempo weekly magazine,
shared a similar view, saying: "We need to consolidate democracy
among members of the political elite at the national and regional
levels as well as at the grassroots level."