Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Jakarta (Agenzia Fides) - Opportunities are few for those who live in Jakarta’s slums. That is especially true for children. Some collect plastic bottles and sort through trash, others play the banjo on local buses for spare change, making just enough money to get by. Their parents cannot afford to pay for birth certificates and without a certificate their future is extremely limited. With high costs and excessive red tape, obtaining a birth certificate in Indonesia can be a bureaucratic nightmare. But birth registration is absolutely critical. Without a legal identity, access to education and basic healthcare is denied.
Data from the Ministry of Social Affairs in 2012 showed that there were 94,000 street children in Indonesia, including an estimated 7,000 in the capital Jakarta. Only 22% had been registered. Indonesia has one of the lowest rates of birth registration among countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam, for example, more than 90 per cent of the population is registered. The Programme for the Protection of Children of the organization Plan surveyed five slums in Jakarta and found that more than 60 per cent of parents had never even tried to register their children. Across Indonesia, Plan estimates that as many as three million children every year join the 30 to 35 million in total who are unregistered. Politically, the State is obliged to develop a system that ensures child welfare and protection and recently the Ministry of Social Affairs launched a national child welfare programme. The goal of the programme is to give every child a savings account with a one-off deposit of around $150 to cover basic education and health costs.
But without a birth certificate, unregistered children are unlikely to qualify. Since 2012, Plan International has run a program. This programme is aimed at raising awareness among street children and their families on the importance of birth registration, and to help the government provide easily accessible birth registration. The Indonesian Parliament changed the law to make registering births simpler and cheaper. In this way, already more than a thousand children have been registered. (AP) (Agenzia Fides 20/04/2015)
