Family planning program of Indonesia

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The family planning program of Indonesia (Keluarga Berencana) contains measures to solve various problems of the Southeast Asian island state. The primary objective is to reduce the birth rate, for this purpose various population groups and religious communities have been and are included.

history

In the early 1950s, doctors, midwives and other experts in Indonesia came together to address maternal and child health problems. They initiated a program that later became known as Keluarga Berencana (" family planning ").

Their efforts led to the establishment of the family planning community (PKBI - Perkumpulan Keluarga Berencana Indonesia) in 1957. It has been developing various programs for family planning to this day.

These programs were designed to be as simple as possible and were promoted primarily as measures to provide health care for both mother and child.

In 1966, the Indonesian government realized that family planning could make a positive contribution to the country's development. In 1967 the then President Suharto signed the World Population Declaration together with 29 other government leaders . As a result, his government committed itself to paying special attention to population development.

A separate ministry was established in 1970 to promote the family planning program. The national authority for family planning, abbreviated BKKBN (Badan Koordinasi Keluarga Berencana Nasional), developed a variety of family planning measures.

At that time, the BKKBN saw a great success in the fact that it managed to win 50,000 participants for its programs. The term family planning hardly caused any public controversy.

A survey carried out at the end of 1987 showed the successes achieved by the Indonesian family planning program up to that point. The survey was conducted in 20 provinces by the Central Bureau of Statistics and Westinghouse. About 93 percent of the country's population lived in these 20 provinces. It was found that 94 percent of all married women knew a modern method of contraception. 63.1 percent of women who were married had used contraception before, and of these 94.5 percent used a modern method.

In the meantime (2007) the BKKBN has 12 to 17 million participants all over Indonesia, adding between 15,000 and 20,000 every day.

Implementation of the programs

At the beginning of the programs, the health-oriented mission was clearly in the foreground. First the government had to do communication, information and training work in order to make its offers accessible to the population at all. Initially, the programs were therefore limited to clinics on the islands of Java and Bali .

The government initially doubted whether its plan would meet with the hoped-for acceptance among the population. In order to guarantee this, it was crucial to convince the religions and their leaders, above all those of Islam , of the meaningfulness and necessity of the devised programs. The Islamic legal scholars (the ulama ) initially argued against the planning program based on their traditional understanding of religion, but were ultimately convinced by the argument of promoting the health of mother and child. This was also confirmed at the Islamic Congress in Aceh , which emphasized the need for sustainable development for Islamic countries too; Family planning does not contradict the Koran.

The Indonesian government communicated its strategies bit by bit to the population in order to prevent major controversy. The entire program was divided into three stages.

First stage

The first stage was to make the citizens more aware of the necessity and attractiveness of the program. The small family with two children was propagated as the norm. Success factors at this level were the growing acceptance and the number of organizations and their employees and helpers who were active in the field of family planning. The central management of the program lay with the BKKBN.

Second step

After the number of participants that could be won over to the program was correspondingly high, efforts were focused on providing all participants with adequate care and keeping the activity of those already recruited high. The aim was to achieve this through mobile family planning teams that visit the participating villages more often and combine planning activities with health care tasks. Furthermore, different methods of contraception were deliberately offered, while at the same time it was explained which method is best suited for the respective participants.

The number of methods was constantly increasing. These actions were part of the KB Mantap (permanent family planning) campaign and the “Safe and Modern Contraception” campaign. These programs included various forms of the IUD ( intrauterine device - the so-called spiral ) to enable women to long-term family planning.

In the second stage, success was measured in terms of the number of active family planning participants, with long-term participation in the project being promoted in particular.

Third step

At this stage, the main focus was on establishing family planning as a social task within economic and social material living conditions. Society was now called to take responsibility itself. Family planning became an integral part of social activities. This was shown by the fact that in 1988 more than 2 million participants took advantage of private family planning consultations from doctors and midwives. This enabled the BKKBN to recognize that its programs were successful and, especially in view of the increasingly scarce resources, it was able to reduce costs.

As the maturity of the participants increased in the meantime, they now had several options, so that three groups can be distinguished:

  • a) Participants who receive full government benefits,
  • b) Families that are only partially supported by the government and
  • c) Participants who can independently finance family planning.

Steps to Implement

  1. Improvements have been made in the organizations: in training, information and communication. This enabled the deployment to be coordinated nationally.
  2. Furthermore, it was now possible to train the workforce involved in family planning at BKKBN so that they could do their jobs in a professional manner.
  3. The employees of the BKKBN received basic equipment, with the help of which it was possible to carry out various family planning measures. These paraphernalia were distributed with the help of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Bank and others. Vehicles and visual aids could be made available to rural regions. This made implementing the family planning program much easier than in the past. Another contribution to the improvement was the better training of the so-called field workers and their increasing number. Education and training centers have been established in many regions.
  4. A wide variety of networking approaches were undertaken, for example a series of radio and television programs on the topic were broadcast.
  5. The target audience of the programs was divided into groups so that certain groups of people could be better addressed.
  6. With each step, the measures were designed in such a way that the way of acting naturally improved. In this way, the precise understanding of problems became an increasingly important task, so the previous behavior gave way to more and more rational attitudes.
  7. The general public was regularly “picked up” for inclusion in family planning, for example on sailing trips or safari tours .
  8. Each step has three approaches. Namely the expansion and development of the range, the maintenance and improvement of the quality and the institutionalization and culturalization.
  9. Aside from dividing society into individual groups, various activities were carried out that were coordinated to suit specific goals and purposes. This was called the Panca Karya (five programs) strategy and it should cover the following:
    • Promotions for couples under 30 with only one child (encouraged not to have more than two children)
    • Campaigns for married couples over 30 with three or more children (who should not have any more children)
    • Actions for the young generation in the hope that they would accept the two-child family as the norm
    • Various actions, with the main aim of institutionalizing and promoting the nuclear family and promoting family planning in newly established communities
    • Various actions, mainly to promote the psychological process of institutionalization and the overcoming of resistance to the nuclear family as the norm, which are based on traditional attitudes towards life

Result

The Indonesian family planning program can be classified as very successful. This is supported by the very positive development of the indicators for population development, the so-called summarized fertility rate . Between 1970 and 1994, this fell from 5.47 to 2.76. Today (2015) this value is estimated at 2.15, which corresponds to a population growth of 0.92 percent per year.

On the other hand, the great attention that the Indonesian government received due to the program and its implementation is a praise in itself: The governments of Bangladesh , the People's Republic of China , India and Vietnam regularly send doctors and specialists to Indonesia for training. Above all, they should benefit from practical experience in implementing and maintaining the KB program. The German federal government also uses information from the Indonesian government in order to better support similar programs in other countries.

literature

  • Haryono Suyono: "The Strategies, Experiences and Future Challenges of the Information Component in the Indonesian Family Planning Program". In: Asia-Pacific Population Journal . Vol. 3, No. 4, 1988, pp. 33-44

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Indonesia - Fertility rate on indexmundi.com
  2. ↑ CIA World Factbook: Indonesia (English)