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Indonesia shares lessons on promoting family planning
Health authorities have worked together with moderate religious leaders to balance conservative views on family planning.
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The National Population and Family Planning Board (BKKBN) revealed that religious leaders, particularly Muslim figures, have played an important role in promoting family planning. (Shutterstock/File)
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ndonesia has shared its lessons learned on family planning and the use of contraceptives after meeting with religious representatives from nine countries during an international training program in Surakarta, Central Java.
The participants came from Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Sudan, most of which have a low contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) and, consequently, a high total fertility rate (TFR), the latter of which represents the number of children per women.
Niger, for instance, has a 20 percent CPR and 7.1 TFR, well below Indonesia’s 61 percent CPR and 2.3 TFR.
The figures are significantly different from those in 1979, when the family planning program was launched in the archipelago. Then, Indonesia had a 5 percent CPR and 5.6 TFR.
The National Population and Family Planning Board (BKKBN) revealed that religious leaders, particularly Muslim figures, had played an important role in promoting family planning in a society that was previously reluctant to embrace such a concept.
Major Muslim organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah issued their recommendations on the family planning program and contraception, saying that the two were allowed in Islam as they allowed Muslims to create prosperous families and strong successors.
“Muslim religious leaders in Indonesia are very cooperative in promoting the program, so it can run smoothly here,” Hermansyah of the BKKBN said on Monday. “If they didn’t help, the program’s achievements wouldn’t be this great.”
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