Countries across Asia are trying everything from fertility tours to baby bonuses to spur population growth in an aging world. Not so in Indonesia, where officials are trying to convince people to have fewer children.
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 decadeslong struggle to bring the fertility rate down from three 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.