Ati Nurbaiti, Jakarta – The invisibility of women-headed households leads to them encountering difficulties when accessing various facilities, said participants in a discussion of the issue on Tuesday.

They were addressing the National Forum of the Association of Women-headed Households (PEKKA), attended by 500 representatives of the association's 20,000 members across 20 provinces, held in Central Jakarta.

The association defines women-headed households as households where the women bear the largest burden of earning income, whether they are single, divorced, widowed, or with spouses or husbands who do not work owing to illness or other reasons, or who hardly provide for them because they leave the home for long spells for work, or because the men are providing for other families in polygamous marriages.

Given such realities, the former chairperson of the women's rights body, Kemala Chandrakirana, said: "For 40 years, women have been robbed of their legal rights". The 1974 Marriage Law explicitly names men as the heads of the household, while wives must take care of the household. The legal barriers strengthened structural discrimination against women, Kemala said.

Both PEKKA and the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) reported data that showed more women heads of households sought facilities such as free health services. But the forum participants said because documents were difficult to access in several areas where they were still charged a fee, many could not access such facilities.

In Yogyakarta, the documents are free, a woman said, while in Madura, East Java, some villages still charge Rp 25,000 (US$2.13) for documents such as the family ID card or kartu keluarga, a representative from Madura said.

The director of social protection and people's welfare at the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), Vivi Yulaswati, urged women to ensure that they had their identification cards as a basis to access facilities.