Anushka Shahjahan – Successful economic development in recent years has failed to lift the livelihoods of children in Indonesia, participants in a conference in Jakarta agreed on Tuesday, arguing that specific programs are needed to protect children and ensure that they benefit from economic growth.

The two-day conference began on Tuesday, with delegates from 15 countries coming together to discuss child poverty and social protection. Representatives from governments and civil society groups also shared lessons learned from successful policy changes that helped to accelerate the reduction of child poverty in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

Speaking at the opening of the conference, Women's Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Linda Gumelar said that while poverty reduction was Indonesia's highest development priority, many children were still denied accesses to adequate education and health care.

Linda said that while poverty was, at the moment, still "only measured by addressing economic development," it would take a holistic, integrated and child-friendly approach to develop effective social policies for dealing with issues related to children.

"The issue of development of children can't be separated from successes in women's empowerment and the achievement of gender equality in families," Linda said, adding that Indonesia aimed to bring the poverty rate, which is currently over 10 percent, down to 8 percent.

Social Affairs Minister Salim Segaf Al Jufri agreed in his speech that an integrated child protection system was required to tackle poverty and boost child protection. An integrated system, he said, would prevent overlap between programs carried out by various stakeholders.

Angela Kearney, the Unicef representative to Indonesia, added during an interview with the Jakarta Globe on the sidelines of the event that child poverty cannot only be calculated in terms of income alone. Other parameters, such as access to sanitation facilities, must also be considered.

"Indonesia is the second ranking country in the world where 63 million people don't have toilets," she said.

Becoming a middle-income country has been a success story for Indonesia, Kearney said. "But I think the success stories do mask, a little bit, the huge disparities within the nation." Although the country has seen huge fiscal growth, "children are not getting the right attention or quality education."

She drew attention to data which shows that although poverty reduction was occurring quickly in Indonesia, poverty reduction among children has not been happening as quickly as it has in the general population.

"Children are still more disadvantaged," she continued. "We want to show the government that you can't just give national data ... you also have to give geographical data, broken into wealth distributions as well and rural compared to urban."

Tuesday's conference will help the government "prepare for the 2015 to 2019 National Medium-Term Development Plan," Minister for National Development Planning Armida S. Alisjahbana said, adding that the conference will provide "solid research about the problems of poverty, especially child poverty, something that is rarely discussed in the broader poverty eradication plan."

"The results of this conference will be used as ... input for the government to formulate the next five-year development planning agenda," said Nina Sardjunani, one of Armida's deputies.

However, concerns remain as to whether policies can be effectively implemented throughout the country and whether policy implementation can be appropriately monitored, given the administrative challenges of decentralization.

Robin Nandy, a senior health advisor at Unicef, told the Jakarta Globe, "it is good to have local decision making and control over funds, but often this money is spent on infrastructure and not on things that make immediate difference to health."

Kearney added, "you can have a presidential decree or you can have a law ... but you have to have district chiefs believe in it. The Ministry of Health can say every child needs immunization or vaccines, but unless the district heads are being held accountable, it won't work."

But Nina remains confident that with the proper procedure, a balance can be found so that the policy will be consistently implemented throughout different regions in Indonesia. She said they would make sure that "major targets [related to child poverty reduction] stipulated in the next five-year development plan are translated into the provincial districts' as well as cities' five-year development plans."