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RI shares lesson on family planning
Indonesia 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
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span>Indonesia 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.”
Hermansyah was speaking on the sidelines of “International Training on Strategic Partnership with Muslim Religious Leaders in Family Planning” in Surakarta, Central Java.
The training, held for a week from April 21 to 28, was initiated by the BKKBN together with the State Secretary Ministry and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) under the South-South and Triangular Cooperation.
Apart from attending workshops, participants of the training would also visit the city’s Religious Affairs Office and Islamic boarding schools to witness religious leaders’ involvement in carrying out the family planning program.
UNFPA Indonesia program officer for advocacy Samidjo said Indonesia was among few predominantly Muslim countries that managed to carry out family planning program properly. “Many countries then intended to learn from us.”
He further explained that some Muslim religious leaders tended to ban family planning programs and contraception, based on their own interpretation of the Quran and hadith.
Such figures often cited Muhammad’s preference for having many children. The saying goes, “Marry the one who is loving and fertile, for I will be proud of your great numbers.”
“They, however, failed to acknowledge the Quran’s mandate for having strong successors only, or else they will sin,” Samidjo said, referring to Quranic verse An-Nisa: 9.
Training participants said they hoped to learn important lessons from the training in Indonesia to improve the state of family planning programs in their respective countries.
Rolanisah A. Dipatuan Dimaporo, a health ministry official at Bangsamoro Autonomous Religion in Muslim Mindanao in the southern Philippines, said she expected to learn how to present family planning “in a way that is easily accepted” by Mindanao residents who lacked a proper education.
“I wish to go back to the region and help [in family planning] in a more technical way,” she said. Philippines Statistics Authority data show that only 26.3 percent of married women in Mindanao signed up for family planning programs in 2017.
