Coordinating Minister For PMK: Jokowi Targets The Stunting Rate To Decrease To 14 Percent In 2024

President Joko Widodo while chairing a closed meeting (Photo: Secretariat of the Indonesian Cabinet)

JAKARTA - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) is targeting the stunting rate to fall to 14 percent in 2024. This was conveyed by the Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture (Menko PMK) Muhadjir Effendy after holding a limited meeting to determine steps to reduce stunting.

"The President has given us directions that by 2024, Indonesia's stunting rate is targeted to fall closer to 14 percent," Muhadjir said in a press conference broadcast on the Presidential Secretariat YouTube account, Monday, January 25.

He said this reduction must be done considering that the stunting rate in the country was still quite high, namely 27.6 percent in 2019 and is expected to increase in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thus, to achieve the specified target, the stunting rate must decrease by 2.7 percent in at least a year.

"This is a very large target and because of that the President has given directions so that there will be extraordinary or extra ordinary steps," he said.

Furthermore, the former Minister of Education and Culture (Mendikbud) said that there were already a number of ways that the government would do to reduce stunting.

One of them is to regulate handling using the legal basis of Law Number 52 of 2009 concerning Population Development and Family Development.

"This means that the reduction in the basic stunting rate will be in an effort to build a family," he said.

"So that family development is not only limited to the problem of limiting the birth rate and the thinning of the birth rate, but actually a family that is an integral family development," he added.

For information, stunting is a child who does not grow according to their age. In children who are stunted, brain cells do not develop optimally. So that it affects intelligence so that some are late thinking or are not smart enough.

There are three causes of stunting, namely food not getting into the child's stomach, food but not knowing how to use it, then enough food comes in but is stolen by worms in the child's stomach, and recurrent infections.