T

he United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said on Friday that it was not all doom and gloom for Indonesia when it came to human development.

UNDP assistant country director and head of poverty reduction Danya Delita Wibowo told The Jakarta Post on Friday that Indonesia’s human development index (HDI) was actually improving, though its ranking in the UNDP human development report had dropped from 108 last year to 124 this year, triggering criticism from the public of the government’s programs.

Indonesia’s HDI improved to 0.617 from 0.613 in 2010.

“Indonesia has been rapidly and consistently developing. In that sense, I think Indonesia is on the right track. And given the wide demography and high population of the country, Indonesia is actually doing quite well,” she added.

Danya told the Post that in terms of ranking, the 2011 report was incomparable to that of the previous year as 18 new countries had been added in this year’s survey.

She said that several parties had failed to interpret indicators determining the education index such as average number of years of schooling and expected number of years of schooling in the right context.

“The definition of mean years of schooling is the average number of years of education received by people aged 25 and older converted from the education attainment level using the official duration of each level. So, it is wrong to approach this using the government’s recent policy on education because people of these age groups have been affected by many previous policies,” she said.

She added that to measure the quality of Indonesia’s mean years of schooling based on the allocation of last year’s state budget was wrong.

“Last year’s state budget should be utilized to measure the expected years of schooling, which is 13.2 years,” she said.

The government has also been defensive following the release of the UNDP report, which ranks Indonesia beneath the five founding members of ASEAN, including Malaysia and Singapore.

The Education and Culture Ministry claims that according to its own measurement, Indonesia’s education index is 0.680, which is higher than the UNDP figure ay 0.584.

Education and Culture Minister Mohammad Nuh told reporters on Tuesday that a different approach in determining Indonesia’s mean years of schooling had caused the different numbers provided by both institutions.

“The UNDP calculated the mean years of schooling based on the average number of years of education undergone by people aged 25 years old and older while the ministry determined it based on the Central Statistic Agency’s [BPS] average number of years of education undergone by people younger than 15 years old,” he said.

He added that the different base of receivers’ ages had resulted in a different average of school years: 5.8 years as used by the UNDP and 7.9 years by the Education and Culture Ministry.

According to Nuh, Indonesia’s large population also influenced the education index because Indonesia’s population of 240 million resulted in the high figure of Indonesians who had yet to pursue primary education.

The ministry is targeting to improve the average number of years of education received by people
aged 15 years and older by minimizing school dropouts and increasing the number of people pursuing higher education.

“We will encourage elementary graduates to continue to junior high, and so on,” Nuh said, adding that the ministry would also improve the quality of and access to early childhood education, primary and higher education, as well as the quality of educational professionals.

The ministry recorded 1,082,000 dropouts in 2011, of which 465,000 were from elementary school, 228,000 from junior high and 389,000 from senior high.

It also states that 3,045,000 school graduates — 445,000 from elementary school, 1 million from junior high school, and 1.6 million from senior high school — cannot afford to pursue higher levels of education.

The government intends to decrease school dropouts to 374,000 people next year. It also aims to financially support half of the students who cannot afford to pursue higher education in order to reduce their numbers to a maximum of 1,477,000 in 2012.

In order to achieve its target, the ministry will provide more financial support for students. “We will subsidize all poor students across the country, increase our support for the Quality Management Operational Aid [BOMM] program for vocational schools by up to 20 percent, and boost the School Operational Aid [BOS] by up to 100 percent,” Nuh said. (msa)