Harry Hikmat, director of the children social service of the Ministry of Social Affairs, talks to Kanis Dursin of IPS Asia-Pacific about how the crisis affected Indonesian children and the government’s different programmes to address this. dealt with it.

Harry Hikmat

Q: How do you assess the government’s response to the global crisis of 2008?

A: The government has managed to suppress poverty, but the number of neglected children continues to rise. The number of neglected children in 2009, for example, is expected to increase by 7 percent from 2006’s 5.4 million children.

Q: Why do you think so?

A: Well-funded anti-poverty programs are more concerned with augmenting poor people’s income than teaching them how to spend the money wisely when their income does increase. Poor families now often spend their money on materialistic, temporary and consumptive needs and not on human investment like education, nutrition, and health of their children. Poor families have to invest in human resources too. Besides, the budget for neglected and other problematic children is very small, accounting only for 4 percent of the national budget. Our budget is not yet pro-child protection budgeting.

Q: What did your ministry do to ease the impact of the crisis on the country’s poor?

We introduced in 2008 the so-called Social Transfer Programme, a programme targeting children in need of special protection, including victims of exploitation, violence, child trafficking, negligence and those in emergency situations. Some of the programmes are directed at meeting basic needs, nutrition for children below five. For children already in school, we help improve their accessibility to education by providing transportation, uniforms, shoes, textbooks, and many more.

We already have a non-discriminatory approach in dealing with impacts of crises. In the 1997-1998 crisis, we had safety net programmes. Now we have social protection programmes such as rice for poor people programme, health insurance for poor people, and school operation assistance funds. These programmes cover all poor people. So, we already have a social protection system in place.

Through the Social Transfer Programme, the Ministry of Social Affairs is targeting marginalised children who have no ID cards, family cards, and birth certificates, which make it difficult for them to have access to education. We want the ministry of health to give health insurance to street children, even if their parents are not classified as poor.

Q: What are your future programmes?

A: We are striving that our Social Transfer Programme covers street children, neglected children, and children with special learning needs. We also want to expand the programme to go beyond the five provinces where we are operating in: Lampung, Jakarta, West Java, Yogyakarta, and South Sulawesi.

(See accompanying story ‘Mobile Classes A Lifeline to Dropouts’ at http://crisisandchildren.ipsnewsasia.net/2010/02/10/mobile-classes-a-lifeline-to-dropouts/)