Evaluation of AID"s role in Indonesian family planning, 1980-1984

Final special evaluation covers the period 1980-84 and is based on document review, analysis of demographic data, field visits, and interviews with staff of the National FP Coordinating Board (BKKBN). The project met or exceeded most targets. Since 1978, contraceptive use by married women of reproductive age has risen from 30% to 60%, to a total of 15 million users, and the crude birth rate has dropped from 36 to 29 births per 1,000 population; the number of FP service points increased from 65,000 to over 200,000. The 13,000 BKKBN workers and uncounted village volunteers have fulfilled critical motivation and information functions, recruited acceptors and supervised acceptor groups, and provided a major logistic link for contraceptive resupply and program data. BKKBN has successfully institutionalized key operations (e.g., contraceptive supply, logistics, information services, and training) previously dependent on A.I.D. support, and it has incorporated local governments into its training and motivation agenda, resulting in good working relationships and an expanded information and influence network which becomes increasingly important as more acceptors are maintained and non-acceptors become harder to reach. Success of the FP program is due in large part to A.I.D."s support of the Village FP program, its facilitation of decentralization through flexible direct supplemental funding of local activities, and its domestic and overseas training programs. A.I.D. should continue to give high priority to Indonesia"s FP program, especially to local cost programming and to continuing effective USAID/I-BKKBN collaboration. Sources of concern for the future include the reduced cost-effectiveness of expanding the highly successful Village FP program to thinly populated outer islands, the fact that BKKBN still lacks a viable urban strategy (despite some innovative urban experiments), a trend toward increased BKKBN bureaucratization, and overtaxing of available facilities by the increased number of acceptors. Included is an analysis of the program"s effect on public health and education expenditures.