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INTRODUCTION
Based on the findings in this SITAN, the following recommendations are relevant for the Government of Indonesia GoI, international and local donor agencies, and other
key stakeholders concerned with improving child rights and welfare. In some, cases the recommendations are specific for particular stakeholders, and in others they are recommended
for all parties.
In general this SITAN recommends that the national and local governments directly implement many of the proposals presented here. For donors and other key stakeholders, this SITAN
recommends that support be provided for the GoI at the national and local levels to implement these recommendations, including through targeted direct implementation in cases where the
GoI requires such assistance. This may be important in some sectors or regions facing particular challenges to improving child rights and welfare.
Given limited resources, the size of Indonesia, and the new decentralised framework, to improve child rights and welfare across the country ideally donors, in particular UNICEF, would assist the
government in building the institutional framework and technical capacity to deliver policies, guidelines, services and programmes. This is in line with UNICEF’s priority of scaling up its
activities and supporting institution strengthening and capacity building. It is also in line with the GoI’s priorities as stated in the National Programme for Indonesian Children PNBAI and the
Government’s National Medium-Term Development Plan RPJMN 2010-2014, which state the GoI’s aim for a developed and inclusive Indonesia that ensures a sustainable and high quality of
life for its entire population.
The recommendations presented here aim to support the Jakarta Commitment to strengthening government ownership of development programmes while ensuring a coordinated approach
among its development partners. They also aim to contribute to the three United Nations Development Assistance Framework UNDAF focus areas that correspond to the main findings,
namely: a addressing inequity; b enhancing participation; and c strengthening resilience.
There are 10 key recommendations presented in these SITAN policy recommendations. Recommendations 7, 8 and 9 are a series of sub-recommendations based on the findings in this
SITAN.
5.1 SUMMARY OF THE 10 RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THIS SITAN
Recommendation 1: Harmonising the national and local level legal framework Recommendation 2: Mainstreaming the Indonesian Law on Child Protection and other
legislation related to child rights and welfare and promoting compliance in national and local regulations, guidelines and policies
Recommendation 3: Improving evidence-based policymaking - Reducing data deficiencies Recommendation 4: Improving evidenced-based policymaking and monitoring -
Strengthening knowledge management, data collection and analysis systems at the national and local levels
Recommendation 5: Improving evidenced-based policymaking - Producing biennial thematic SITAN of women and children and other key public documents
Recommendation 6: Establishing a comprehensive National Child Special Protection System to uphold and monitor child rights and welfare as mandated by the Indonesian Law
on Child Protection
Recommendation 7: Promoting equitable development for women and children - Targeting interventions on worst performers to improve poverty reduction and pro-poor growth, and
reach the MDGs with equity
Recommendation 8: Strengthening the decentralised system through local level capacity building and support in development planning processes - Improving consultative planning
processes, regulations, policy formulation, programme design and service delivery to be pro-child and pro-women
Recommendation 9: Advocating the scale up of specific sectoral interventions to improve child rights and welfare and reduce inequity
Recommendation 10: Communications for development to assist with knowledge building and behavioural change to support other targeted interventions and improve the situation of
women and children in Indonesia
5.1.1 RECOMMENDATION 1: HARMONISING THE NATIONAL AND LOCAL LEVEL LEGAL FRAMEWORK IN RELATION TO CHILD RIGHTS AND WELFARE
Recommended for: GoI with the support of UNICEF and international agencies
As a part of the GoI’s current commitment to pro-child policymaking and continued efforts to improve the situation of women and children in Indonesia, this SITAN recommends:
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• Ratifying the Optional Protocols in the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women CEDAW and the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child CRC. This would
further strengthen Indonesia’s efforts over the past 10 years to institutionalise the human rights and child rights legal frameworks and policy platforms in the country.
• Together with the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs, reviewing provincial and district municipal regulations, decrees and other instruments to ensure that they are in line with
national level laws especially the Indonesian Law on Child Protection, ILCP, regulations, technical guidelines and the Indonesian constitution.
• Harmonizing the laws related to the age of children across the Marriage Law, the Health Law, the Citizenship Law, the ILCP, and other relevant laws, to ensure that the rights of all young
people are protected and they have adequate access to special protection, health including reproductive health services, and other age-appropriate services. Ensure that these laws are
also harmonised by gender i.e., the Marriage Law has different legal ages for marriage.
• Monitoring the compliance of national and local level regulations and policies with key laws on child rights, in particular the ILCP.
5.2 RECOMMENDATION 2: MAINSTREAMING THE INDONESIAN LAW
ON CHILD PROTECTION AND OTHER LEGISLATION RELATED TO CHILD RIGHTS AND WELFARE AND PROMOTING COMPLIANCE IN
NATIONAL AND LOCAL REGULATIONS, GUIDELINES AND POLICIES
Recommended for: GoI together with UNICEF and other key stakeholders
The findings of this SITAN indicate that some of the violations of child rights are related to insufficient knowledge, in particular of the ILCP, Law No. 232002. The ILCP needs to be further
mainstreamed and explained to all stakeholders, including the national and local governments executive, legislative and judicial branches to better feed into policy formulation, and to civil
society civil society organisations, academia, community and religious leaders, and political parties to support policy implementation. As stated previously, child protection in Indonesia is
understood more widely to include rights to education, health, legal aid, and other mechanisms, as compared with the UNICEF definition of child protection, which incorporates vulnerabilities to
violence, traficking, labour, prostitution, and other similar aspects, which are deined as ‘special protection’ in Indonesia.
Further efforts to mainstream the ILCP are required in order to strengthen capacity to administer the ILCP and resulting policies, directives, regulations, guidelines and services, which at present
is uneven across Indonesia’s provinces and districts. Mainstreaming should be undertaken through the initiatives outlined later in Recommendation 10 on Communications for development
with government bodies, non-government organisations NGOs and civil society organisations CSOs. This should further be expanded to include all levels of society, including families,
schools and children in general. This could serve as a key role for both the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection and the corresponding local Bureaus which are mandated
to coordinate initiatives, conduct mainstreaming and knowledge dissemination, and to monitor activities. The Ministry and local Bureaus could also work with the Ministry of Home Affairs to
monitor compliance with local level regulations and policies. The successful interventions and establishment of child protection policies and services identified
in the case studies in this SITAN involved, for example in the Child-Friendly City project in Surakarta, the political will of leaders in the executive and legislative branches of government to
prioritise child protection in policies, budgets and regulations, and to establish inter-departmental initiatives and the steps towards establishing provincial and district level Bureaus of Women’s
Empowerment and Child Protection. Encouraging sharing between districts and provinces on these initiatives as a part of the mainstreaming process, and creating other incentives for
compliance, are the necessary steps for creating the political will to improve child rights and welfare in the decentralised context.
Furthermore, creating such political will should be a dual process of providing the technical support for musrenbang processes discussed in Recommendation 8 so that bottom-up demands
for child-friendly policies and specific interventions reach the ears of local leadership, while top- down education on understanding and translating national policies on child protection, together
with research and other information, would also be part of the mainstreaming process.
5.3 RECOMMENDATION 3: IMPROVING EVIDENCE-
BASED POLICYMAKING - REDUCING DATA DEFICIENCIES
Recommended for: GoI with support of UNICEF and other stakeholders
It is clear from the process of formulating the SITAN that there are weaknesses in the systematic collection of data on child welfare and rights. Uniform data and clear definitions are essential
for monitoring the gaps, performance and impact of programmes in each sector related to child welfare. It is also important for understanding the holistic situation of children and the multi-
sectoral linkages; that is, how one vulnerability in the situation of a child may relate to other vulnerabilities. For example, how better nutrition may improve other outcomes in child welfare,
such as reductions in mortality rates or better performance and attendance at school, and how better school attendance may lead to better knowledge of safe-sex practices and reduced rates of
sexually transmitted infections STIs, including HIV infection.
The discussion in Section 3 highlighted that data related to child protection - as defined by UNICEF and other international agencies concerned with child welfare - is particularly weak. In
Indonesia, child protection is defined broadly in laws and regulations as well as the Medium- and Long-Term National Development Plans, and includes, for example, aspects of health and
education. Other aspects of protecting child welfare, such as safeguarding children from domestic and other forms of violence, trafficking, forced migration, incarceration, etc., fall under the banner
of ‘special protection’ in legal and policy instruments related to children. Hence, many of the data deiciencies in Indonesia exist in terms of ‘special protection’ for children.
There are data in some provinces and districts on certain aspects of special protection as well as in other sectors such as education, health and nutrition, water and sanitation, and the prevalence
of HIV and AIDS. However, these data are not always systematically collected by the government or related agencies at both the national level and sub-national level, using the consistent
definitions, or over time. For instance, the definitions and indicators used to define aspects of special protection in the small number of ad hoc studies conducted mainly case studies
vary considerably. In some, ‘violence’ is limited to physical violence only, while in others it
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includes aspects of psychological violence and neglect. As discussed in Section 3, when broader definitions are used they cannot always be disaggregated to in order to compare similar subsets
of data with earlier studies, making it difficult to draw an accurate picture of the changes taking place over time.
In spite of this, this SITAN pieced together, from disparate data sources, a picture of the trends in key indicators of child welfare in Indonesia. It has shown that in many sectors there have been
aggregate improvements, while identifying other sectors that require continued attention. This SITAN has also begun the process of trying to identify whether there are inequities between
population groups in these improvements. Gaps in the available data have made it difficult to consistently identify both the sources of vulnerabilities and the populations most at risk. It has
also been difficult to ascertain whether the interventions and policies introduced have improved the welfare of women and children over time, and how or under what circumstances international
and local agencies can provide support for the GoI in its efforts to alleviate child suffering.
Nonetheless, this SITAN has demonstrated that despite improvements in those indicators for which data are available, inequalities still exist, particularly for the poor. It is therefore likely
that equitable development will be one of the key issues in the future as Indonesia continues to makes progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals MDGs, improving
economic growth and reducing poverty. Therefore, data will be essential for future evidence- based policymaking that aims to understand the sources of inequality and inequity and the types
of populations that may be lagging behind, to ensure the appropriate targeting of the poor, women and different populations of children. Comparisons need to be made between regions
urbanrural, provincial, district, sub-district and even villages and groups within society income, age, gender, religious, ethnic and other identities by policymakers, government agencies and
practitioners.
In line with the UNICEF Mid-Term Strategic Plan, this SITAN recommends that UNICEF and other agencies support the GoI at the local and national levels to conduct further research and
data collection related to education and early childhood development ECD; health, nutrition, water and sanitation; HIV and AIDS and the situation of adolescents; and, most importantly,
child special protection and other aspects of child welfare more generally. The specific data gaps identified in the process of compiling this SITAN include data over time using standardised
definitions on the following this is not an exhaustive list:
Child special protection • Child poverty both income and non-income poverty
• The hidden employment of children in informal sectors, which may result from forced
migration such as trafficking, and domestic internment, etc. • Numbers, handling, and pastcurrent living conditions for:
o children in pre-trial and post-trial detention and children in conflict with the law o children in contact with the law as victims and witnesses
o orphaned children o children involved in pornography
o children living on the streets o trafficked children
o children forced into sex work o children and young people using drugs
o children and young people living with HIV and AIDS o percentage of AIDS orphans in high prevalence provinces
1 UNICEF n.d. Definitions - Education, available at: http:www.unicef.orginfobycountrystats_popup5.html Last accessed 17 March 2011
o displaced children o children of migrants
o children migrating alone o children with special needs
o children involved in the most hazardous forms of labour o children working illegally
o child domestic workers o children experiencing violence at home
o children experiencing violence at school o neglected children
• The provision and quality of care in alternative care institutions and the numbers of children in institutional care
• Unregistered births • Child and women victims of domestic violence
o types of violence o conditions in the home
o likely causes
• Data deiciencies Health, nutrition, water and sanitation
• Maternal mortality rates at the provincial level • UN process indicators of emergency obstetric and neonatal care services
• Treatment coverage of diarrhoea with oral rehydration salts and zinc for children under ive • Treatment coverage of pneumonia with antibiotics for children under ive
• Nationwide and provincial data of annual parasite incidence malaria • Costing of health interventions at district level for inancing and budgeting
• Exclusive breastfeeding practices and complementary feeding at the sub-national level • Stunting, wasting and underweight rates over time
• Access to clean water and adequate sanitation using Joint Monitoring Programme JMP
measurement methods Education
Data issues for education are as much about accuracy of data as as about data gaps. Better quality data using standardised definitions1, particularly at the sub-national level, are
needed on: • ECD education facilities type, quality, access and enrolmentattendance
• Gross and net primary school, junior and senior secondary school enrolment ratios gender • Completion rates of primary school Years 1-9
• Early school leaving rates • Last school year completed
• Transition rates from primary to junior secondary school • Numbers of internet users, phone users
More research is needed on: • ‘Access to issues’ among vulnerable and disadvantaged groups i.e., applying the ‘access to
justice’ approach to the education sector
