The Stunting Rate in Indonesia Is Targeted to Decrease by 17% This Year

The condition of failure to thrive in children under five due to chronic malnutrition or stunting in Indonesia is still quite high
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Stunting is still a big problem in Indonesia. However, the government tries to solve stunting in several ways. Therefore, the Ministry of Health (Kemenkes) targets the stunting rate in Indonesia to drop to 17% in 2023.

Reducing the stunting rate is one of the priority programs owned by President Joko Widodo (Jokowi). At the end of his term of office, Jokowi even targeted the percentage of stunting sufferers to drop to 14 percent in 2024.

“The target that I conveyed, we must achieve 14 percent in 2024. I’m sure that with our shared strength, everyone is moving, it’s not a difficult number as long as everyone works together,” said Jokowi, Wednesday (25/1/2023).

The Minister of Health (Menkes) Budi Gunadi Sadikin said the target was expected to facilitate the Ministry of Health’s task of reducing the stunting rate to 14 percent in 2024.

“This year it is hoped that we can catch up to a reduction to 17 percent, so that we can catch up the momentum from now 21.6 percent to 14 percent later,” explained Budi in the agenda ‘Socialization of Policy Interventions to Accelerate Stunting Reduction in 2023’, Friday (3/2/ 2023).

The Ministry of Health also targets that the number of anthropometric measuring devices will increase by 127,033 by 2023. Weight measurement at the Integrated Service Post (Posyandu) is one of the early detections to prevent the cases in newborns. It is expected that the need for 313,737 measuring devices can be met in 2024.

Budi said that his party was also working on changes to the method of measuring stunting in Indonesia. Now, the Ministry of Health is still making measurements using the survey method.

This method itself is a measurement method that has been carried out by the Ministry of Health to measure stunting rates in Indonesia for the past three years. In its implementation, the Ministry of Health is known to be working with the Faculty of Public Health, University of Indonesia (UI).

As previously reported, the Minister of Health claimed a reduction to 21.6 percent in 2022 or a reduction of 2.8 percent from the stunting rate in 2021.

“The results of the 2021 survey show that our stunting rate is 24.4 percent, and in 2022 it will drop to 21.6 percent. We will conduct this survey every year,” Budi said in a joint working meeting with Commission IX of the DPR RI, Tuesday (24/1 /2023).