Indonesia to have difficulty achieving Millennium Development Goals targets

Antara 15 Jun 10;

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Indonesia will have difficulty achieving its MDG (Millennium Development Goals) targets because of the low commitment of its government and political institutions to prioritizing health and education, a developmental economist said.

"I am pessimistic about Indonesia`s ability to achieve its MDG targets by 2015," University of Indonesia (UI) economic development lecturer Mayling Oey Gardiner said in a speech to mark her appointment as a member of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (AIPI) here Monday.

She said, in 2009, a total of 189 UN member countries had committed themselves to attaining the following eight goals : fighting poverty and hunger, making education available to all, encouraging gender equality and woman`s empowerment, reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other contagious diseases, ensuring preservation of the environment, and promoting global partnerships for development.

According Mayling, Indonesia managed to lower its poverty rate from 20.6 percent in 1990 to 16.6 percent in 2007, but the poor people were identified as those living on less than one US dollar per capita per day.

"But if the spending level was raised to two US dollars per capita per day, there would still be 49 percent of the population categorized as poor," she said.

In terms of realizing elementary education for all, if elementary education was defined as nine years of schooling, Indonesia`s target was still a long way off.

"In 2007 the pure participation rate in elementary education was 94 percent but the pure participation rate of children aged 13 to 15 years in secondary education was only 67 percent, and so far there had been no breakthrough to increase this figure," she said.

She regretted that the government was now enthusiastically subsidizing so-called international-standard schools with as much Rp500 million a year per school while there was no subsiidy at all to enable elementary school children in remote parts of the country to continue their studies at secondary schools as called for in the MDG program.

In the public health field, Mayling said, she had so far not heard a firm government commitment to prioritize the lowering of the maternal and infant mortality rate while its MDG target called for reduction of the current figure to 102 per 100,000 deliveries by 2015.

"A survey in 2007 put the maternal mortality rate at 228 per 100,000 deliveries. This was related to the fact that a high number of deliveries took place without the assistance of trained medical personnel, namely one-third of deliveries," she said. (*)