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Ministry vows to take care of COVID-19 orphans
Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Bintang Puspayoga said 4,287 children had lost at least one parent to COVID-19.
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A woman helps her son choose a face shield at a roadside kiosk in Depok, West Java, on Monday, to protect him from COVID-19, as the gradual reopening of social and educational activities means children will spend more time in public. (JP/P.J.Leo)
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he government has pledged to take care of thousands of children orphaned by the COVID-19 pandemic, amid revelations of inadequate data collection preventing this growing social problem from being properly addressed.
Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Bintang Puspayoga said on Monday that 4,287 children had lost at least one parent to COVID-19, according to ministry data from Sunday.
The data was compiled by the ministry’s regional agencies through the Rapid Pro mobile app, which was developed with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). But the app’s dataset does not reflect actual numbers because the information is self-reported.
Bintang conceded that there was currently no working national database on orphans, but said the ministry had entrusted the task of compiling this information to the national COVID-19 task force.
“There’s a national limitation in the task force to collect data on adult coronavirus patients who have left a child behind. On Aug. 13, the ministry sent a letter to the task force requesting it to integrate COVID-19 orphan data with other data on the task force’s website,” the minister told the House of Representatives at a hearing.
Despite the scattered data, the minister said her office was supporting efforts by regional administrations in providing the psychosocial needs of 1,500 children who had lost at least one of their parents or a caretaker to COVID-19.
The ministry, she added, was also sending out 5,000 packages of personal protective equipment to social workers who looked after orphans and at-risk families. It was also seeking to fulfill the basic, specific and educational needs of orphaned children through a collaboration with Forum Zakat, an almsgiving foundation.
Read also: Data issue hinders government help for COVID-19 orphans
Previously, Social Affairs Minister Tri Rismaharini said 11,045 children had been orphaned by COVID-19, citing task force data as of July 20, around the time when the surge in new Delta variant cases was gaining momentum.
A ministry official later revealed that the figure was an approximation based on the data of people ages 19 through 45 who had died from COVID-19 and had children.
As public pressure mounted, the ministry instructed all provincial administrations to speed up data collection on orphaned children ages 17 and under, so it could verify their identities and address, and reach out to them. Only East Java and Yogyakarta have reported back.
The problem of inadequate data has been the bane of the government’s social work even outside of the realm of orphans. Underreporting still plagues Indonesia’s COVID-19 response, rendering official data unreliable and obscuring the true scale of the pandemic in the country.
Unreliable data has also led to the misappropriation and general misapplication of COVID-19 social assistance.
