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East Flores regent develops program to reduce stunting
Gerobak Cinta (Love Cart) is what East Flores Regent Antonius Hubertus Gege Hadjon named his administration’s program to reduce the high rate of stunting in the regency
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span>Gerobak Cinta (Love Cart) is what East Flores Regent Antonius Hubertus Gege Hadjon named his administration’s program to reduce the high rate of stunting in the regency.
The “cart” in the program’s name is metaphorical. Antonius said the cart symbolized the program’s philosophy of fast action to address stunting.
“When we talk about Gerobak Cinta, many people think about a cart for bakso [meatball soup] and other things,” Antonius said in a discussion session at the Reasonable Business Forum on Food and Agriculture (RBF) in Central Jakarta on Tuesday. “But what we mean is how, through love, we help feed these children and overcome stunting."
Through the program, which was initiated in July 2019, Antonius’s administration provided two meals a day for 90 days for more than 2,000 toddlers under the age of 2 in the regency. The meals were made up of local ingredients such as sorghum, kelor (moringa plant), fish and quail eggs, and were prepared by integrated health services post (Posyandu) workers. The children’s mothers also took part in preparing the meals in order to learn the components of a healthy diet.
After those 90 days, East Flores’s stunting rate of 44 percent, one of the highest in the country, was reduced to 26 percent, below that of the East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) average of 42.46 percent.
Stunting, which the World Health Organization defines as a condition in which a child fails to reach his or her linear growth potential, remains an ongoing problem in Indonesia, but is not the only challenge that the country faces regarding nutrition.
In a speech at the RBF, National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) deputy head Arifin Rudiyanto said that Indonesia faced a triple burden of malnutrition, consisting of undernutrition, overnutrition and micronutrient deficiency.
A 2019 UNICEF report found that 59 percent of the country’s children under 5 years old were not growing at the proper rate because of stunting, wasting or being overweight.
Pungkas Bahjuri Ali, Bappenas’s director for public health and nutrition, said the different forms of malnutrition had different causes.
“Overnutrition is a matter of lifestyle and behavior, a lack of balance between eating and exercising. But undernutrition is more complex and can have many causes.” Pungkas told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the RBF.
“Undernutrition is not even a matter of just getting enough food but about diseases, too. If we eat enough but suffer from diarrhea, we will still not get enough nutrition.”
In the case of stunting, the country has made some progress, reducing the rate in children under 5 years old to 29.3 percent in 2019 from 36.4 percent in 2015. Bappenas aims to further reduce the rate to 10 percent by 2030, but reaching that goal is not without obstacles.
One of the biggest hurdles is poverty — many parents simply do not have enough money to provide a healthy diet for their children. NTT, which has the highest stunting rate among the country’s provinces, also has the third-highest poverty rate, below only Papua and West Papua.
But Antonius said from his experience, it was not only poor children that suffered from stunting.
“Even children from well-to-do families can be afflicted by stunting. For example, some children may not want to eat because they’re busy playing with their phones or other gadgets, resulting in irregular meal times, which also contributes to stunting,” he told the Post. “From that we concluded, parenting style is also very important to reduce stunting.”
Antonius added that a lack of awareness about stunting and the importance of addressing it was also a challenge he faced.
“When I first declared a commitment to reduce stunting in East Flores in November 2018, very few people there had ever heard of stunting. Even for me it was still a little unclear,” he said.
Mei JO Tatengkeng, the NTT representative of Dutch nonprofit SNV who has been working with Antonius to develop anti-stunting programs, agreed and said that educating teenagers and young adults about the dangers of stunting was also key, as they would become the parents of the next generation.
Pungkas said Bappenas was also working with the Religious Affairs Ministry to provide information about stunting to engaged couples.
