Why Indonesia wants to put lid on baby boom while Asia tries to spur birth rates
- Officials are trying to convince people to have fewer children as Indonesia focuses more on improving the quality of the population
- The country’s efforts contrast with neighbours like Singapore, where the government has offered to increase cash support for citizens who have kids
The world’s fourth most-populous country is promoting later marriages, family planning and contraception to lower its fertility rate to 2.1 children per woman by 2025. That’s the “replacement rate” that would effectively flatten population growth in the country of 270 million, damping some concerns that overcrowding could mean fewer job opportunities and strains on government services.
Indonesia’s latest push – a family planning campaign starting from late January – follows a decades-long struggle to bring the fertility rate down from 3 children per woman in the early 1990s. The difference now, National Population and Family Planning Agency Head Hasto Wardoyo says, is that instead of just slowing population growth, Indonesia is aiming to simultaneously improve other factors such as health, education and employment.
“In the past, the focus was on reducing the quantity of the population. Now it’s more on improving the quality of the population,” Wardoyo said.
That might appear to be a risky venture for an emerging market, especially one that has lured investors with its youthful demographics and cheap labour. China famously has found it’s a struggle to reset the habits of families who for decades were restricted to one child.