Indonesia Demographic Context

Indonesia Demographic Context

Indonesia is the biggest archipelago country in the world, consisting of 17,508 islands and nearly 6,000 of them are inhabited. It is prone to a variety of natural disasters, such as earthquake, volcanic eruptions and flood. It is also the fourth most populous country after China, India, and the United States (231,328,092 million in 2002). This former Dutch, European and Japanese colony has recently more than 400 regencies (rural districts) and municipalities (autonomous cities), 32 provinces, and 350 ethic groups.

Its educational system has to manage 43 million pupils, 2.6 million teachers, and 260,000 schools across the country (ICoE, 2004). It recently experienced rural – urban migration as the country’s agriculture-based economy moved to late industrialisation with side effects like overcrowded schools and over supplied teachers in urban areas and multi-graded classes in rural areas.

Furthermore, Indonesia completed universal six-year basic education (USYBE) in 1984, and self-committed to universal nine-year basic education (UNYBE) programme since 1994. Initially, the UNYBE had proved to be successful in increasing the number of primary and lower secondary school students (from 36.44 million in 1994 to 39 million in 1997). However, it decreased slowly since 1998, as Indonesia faced prolonged economic crisis, saw the drop out rate soar from two per cent before the crisis to six per cent after the crisis began (Dursin, 2001). Of 25 million primary school pupils enrolled, only 72.12 % of them finished and continued to lower secondary schools and while 670,000 of them were drop-outs (MONE’s 2000/2001 data cited in Hidayatullah, 2001).

This high drop out rate is due to a wide range of problems, ranging from inability to pay school and parental participation fees, to gender bias to conflicts and natural disasters. Data shows significant gender gaps in school dropout rates at primary and lower and upper secondary schools. According to Asian Economic News (2003) girls are more likely to drop out of school than boys for many reasons – from bans by parents to continue their studies to give a better chance to the boys, to early marriages due to conservative views that girls will land in the kitchen anyway. Not surprisingly, nearly 20% of women are illiterate compared with less than 10% of men. Data taken from ten provinces by the Department of Social Affairs also showed that of dropout children above, 41,000 of them became street children (Hidayatullah, 2001).

The recent quality of education is declining due to its former centralised management system and recent economic crisis. A Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) in 2001 placed Indonesia second to last out of the twelve Asian countries surveyed, below Vietnam. In the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s 2004 Report on Human Development Index, in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income, Indonesia was also ranked at 111 out of 177 countries surveyed; below other ASEAN countries such as Singapore (25), Brunei (33), Malaysia (59), Thailand (76), Philippines (83), but above indo-Chinese countries (ICoE, 2004).