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em>The recent population census found that Indonesia has experienced rapid population growth, and this will likely continue from what some have attributed to the stagnation of its family planning program. The Jakarta Post’s Elly Burhaini Faizal talked to Terence H. Hull, a professor of demography from the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute (ADSRI) at the Australian National University (ANU), about the challenges facing the country’s family planning program. Below are the excerpts.

Question: Despite the ongoing family planning program, population growth in Indonesia has been rapid, at about 1.49 percent per year. Why?

Answer: In 2000, there were millions of people who were not included in the census. In 2010, there were also millions of people not included, but fewer. So it was much better coverage in the 2010 census, and indicated the rate of growth between the figures published in 2000 and in 2010 was 1.49 percent. But the real population growth rate was much lower because you can’t just look at the number published in 2010. You have to adjust both ends. When you do the adjustment it might be 1.3 percent, 1.36 percent or 1.38 percent.

The current level of population growth doesn’t make any difference, anyway. Does it make any difference to you if the population today is 245 million people, 250 million, or even 255 million? The degree of gridlock on the roads is just the same. You only care about those numbers because you’re interested in what is going to happen with the future of this country. If those numbers indicate that the people who are missed by the census are also missed by all social programs, such as health and education programs, then I would be very concerned that government officials do not want to recognize them.

Do you think the National Demography and Family Planning Agency (BKKBN) is still relevant?

It’s important to ensure that every woman in Indonesia has full choice of all methods of contraception. During the last 15 years, the proportion of women using injecting contraceptive methods has increased phenomenally and has overwhelmed all other methods. The family planning program is in trouble. It needs new direction. It needs new energy to offer good services.

When people talk about population explosion, however, they often don’t talk about services. What they talk about is just making women do something, whereas we have to make sure that impoverished women do not reproduce so much. We have to give women good services.

If we want to revitalize family planning, what should the BKKBN do?

There are two dimensions regarding this issue. In one dimension, you can talk revitalizing bureaucracy and government organization. What is important is to ensure that in all 520 regencies and municipalities, there’s someone who is concerned and studying about population, as well as developing policies that are good. I don’t see those units working very well. Within that hierarchy, you only need one or two people in a regency to work on demography, rather than what is happening now: a bureaucracy of 50 or 100 people. The idea of someone actually working as an autonomous analyst has not been established here. So, you really have to decide what kind of picture, bureaucratically speaking, should the BKKBN be looking for? My own view is, you should look for a very lean, but very strong analytical capacity at the central level and at local levels.

The second dimension is the revitalization of the services themselves and what kind of thing you expect. I would expect the proportion of women who obtain their contraceptives from private sources to be lower than 70 percent, which is what it is now. Contraceptive services in many countries are given free of charge but that is no longer the case in Indonesia, and many women in Indonesia needing contraceptives are low-income.

What do you think is the biggest obstacle affecting contraceptive delivery?

In Indonesia, the problem lies in the fact that midwives in villages used to be government employees. They had short-term contracts, or PTT. The short-term contract spans from two to three years; it can be extended to six years but there are no more contracts after that. People who were government employees but then became private practitioners are effectively running their own private services. They do not get much financial benefit from pills, and even less from condoms. They do get paid for injections, however. Every injection is money. If you go for an injection covering three months, and then you change to one month, the midwives can receive three times as much money. So, midwives have changed the contraceptive profile of Indonesian women. Indonesian women used to have choices of all contraceptives, including IUD and implants, and they also had better opportunities to apply for sterilization than nowadays. Someone should undertake very serious analysis as to what is the most efficient way to ensure that contraceptives are available everywhere.

Some experts urge the government to recentralize the family planning program as regional autonomy has been blamed for stagnation in the family planning program. What’s your comment?

Regional autonomy is another challenge facing the family planning program. You have to ensure that local people and governments are committed to family planning. And right now, there are a lot of places where the commitment is not there. A lot of local governments, even though they have been democratically elected by local people, have not delivered good quality services to their own people. There’s been a priority for the government to control women’s fertility, but there has never been a priority for women to be empowered to control their own fertility.

I’ve just become frustrated looking at the waste of time and money and good people who should be able to do good things. However, the question of whether local governments have the commitment to family planning, or whether you should ignore their role and go back to a central-command economy, it’s ridiculous because the command economy was not committed to women’s rights. The command structure in the 1970-1980s was all about controlling population explosion but not about serving women.