Jakarta. The populous Indonesia, which dreams of becoming a high-income economy by its centennial in 2045, recorded a declining national stunting rate during the era of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

Stunting is impaired growth among children due to poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Stunted children are typically too short for their age, while also failing to reach their physical and cognitive potential. The stunting prevalence shows how common stunting is in a region. 

Jokowi became Indonesia’s seventh president in 2014. In his first year, the national stunting rate stood at 37 percent -- far from the WHO’s standards of less than 20 percent. As of 2018, the stunting rate reached 30.8 percent and then went down to 27.67 percent in 2019 -- the last year of Jokowi’s first term, the Indonesian Toddler Nutrition Status data showed. The figures also continued to decline in Jokowi’s second term. The stunting rate shrunk from 24.4 percent in 2021 to 21.6 percent in 2022. The latest data reported a downtick to 21.5 percent as of last year.

Jokowi aims to cut the stunting rate to 14 percent by the end of 2024. 

“I do acknowledge that cutting down [the stunting rate] from 37 percent to 14 percent is very ambitious, but we have to work hard to achieve that goal,” Jokowi told reporters back in June.

The first 1,000 days of life are a critical window for stunting interventions.

Over the past decade, Jokowi has also “revitalized” 10,000 community health centers -- locally known as puskesmas. Revitalization programs include procuring medical equipment and improving the services that they may need to better serve the patients, particularly pregnant women and mothers.

About 85,000 supplementary community health centers (puskesmas pembantu) and 300,000 integrated health service posts (posyandu) also underwent similar revitalization programs. Jokowi once said that the government had distributed ultrasound machines for 10,000 puskesmas to enable earlier pregnancy detection. The government has also rolled out 300,000 weighing scales to a number of posyandu in Indonesia.

Indonesian puskesmas also provide training sessions to brief mothers on what they can do to prevent stunting.

“We hold briefings on breastfeeding so we can inform mothers on what they need to consume so their kids will be healthy. We also provide additional nutrition made from local food crops,” Bantul 1 Puskesmas representative Kreissita Andiyanti told BTV, not long ago. 

The state budget for the health sector has also been on the rise throughout Jokowi’s second term. The government set aside Rp 119.9 trillion ($7.7 billion) in health-related spending in 2020. The figures rose to Rp 124.4 trillion in 2021, and Rp 134.8 trillion the following year. The government made about Rp 172.5 trillion in health-related spending last year, and has now allotted a total of Rp 187.5 trillion for 2024.

As Jokowi’s era draws to a close, it is now up to his successor Prabowo Subianto to do the rest. Prabowo’s signature program of feeding Indonesian school children free lunches mainly aims to cut down the national stunting rate. As the government prepares to make sure that the lunch distribution runs like a well-oiled machine, only time will tell how effective the free meal program is in the fight against stunting.