A Paradigm Shift in Indonesia: Women Taking the Lead

Nani Zulminarni is a soft-spoken woman from a small town in West Kalimantan, one of the poorest provinces in Indonesia.  

Short in stature and clad in alternating-but-always-bright hijabs, she defies traditional stereotypes around leadership. Yet, Nani has directly impacted the lives of 19 million women in Indonesia through a model that not only focuses on changing policies but also mindsets, successfully laying the foundation for a sustained movement for women’s rights in Indonesia. 

In 2001, Nani established PEKKA, or “Female-Headed Households Empowerment,” forever changing the restrictive status quo for single women in Indonesia. Through a hybrid model: grassroots organizing combined with a top-down approach, PEKKA has millions of women get recognizing as the heads of their families and transformed dominant mindsets about women’s capacities as leaders. 

Making the Invisible, Visible  

When Nani got divorced in 2000, she was confronted with the harsh reality in Indonesia that women and their families’ legal rights are inextricably tied to their marital status. When women get divorced, they lose respect and are often blamed, and legally they are stripped of the ability to head their families. Furthermore, the children of these women-headed households also denied birth certificates, perpetuating a cycle of poverty evident in the fact that most of Indonesia’s poorest are rural and unregistered single women and their children. “When I got divorced, it was very difficult for me to get my own family identification card with my name as the head of the family, even though I raised the three kids – three children!” Nani exclaimed.

Nani realized that if she wanted to fight for women to be leaders within their families, she had to address the issue from two levels. On the micro-level, mindsets around women’s leadership needed to change. On the macro-level, policies that barred women from recognition as the head of their household needed to be altered so that these women could finally be entitled to protection and benefits under Indonesian law.  

Before she could address mindsets or policies, Nani needed to define the scope of the issue. So she teamed up with a prestigious research institute, trained a legion of women, and embarked on a journey to see how many women-headed households existed across the Indonesian archipelago, which comprises no less than 76,000 villages. 

The research revealed there were at least 25% of families are headed by women in Indonesia. This information was crucial in providing more accurate national statistics that could then directly influence budget allocation, significantly increasing visibility for female heads of households.  

However, Nani found that most women’s marital status was not registered, either married or not, due both to the lack of accessibility and the expense of the courts. Without legal status, a woman’s eligibility to access resources like emergency support during COVID-19 is forfeited, regardless of how many children she has.  

Scaling Up: Redefining Regulations 

Equipped with countless personal testimonies and these staggering figures, Nani showcased the findings to the government to lobby for policy reform. 

The significant absence in marital registrations, around 60% nationally, was due to a combination of barriers: a lack of information surrounding the process, expensive court fees, and far away registration locations. The current system made it essentially impossible for women from rural communities to register, subsequently forfeiting any benefits that came with legal recognition.

Equipped with solid data and determination, PEKKA reformed the system, successfully lobbying the supreme court to transition to a new system called “mobile courts,” bringing courts to villages across Indonesia and sending legal representatives to hard-to-reach communities. To tackle the problem pertaining to high costs, a regulation established a fee waiver for low-income communities.  

Additionally, data showed there were 40 million children who, due to the fact that their mothers do not have their own legal identity, do not possess birth certificates. Due to PEKKA and its alliances’ advocacy work, the government set up a system called, “one-stop service system” where not only marriages and divorces could be registered, children could receive birth certificates as well.  

Yet, the most important part of this process — the ability for women to legally head their families — required further creativity and persistence. The fight for changing marriage law in Indonesia is entering its 25th year with little success. Frustrated by this stagnation, Nani decided she needed to tackle this issue from a different angle: through the perspective of poverty alleviation and pushing the terminology of “women-headed families” or “PEKKA”to be integrated into official nomenclature in Indonesian.  

PEKKA’s data revealed that the poorest group in Indonesia are women-headed families. She showcased these figures to the government, which was pressured to consider this population during financial support packages during the Coronavirus outbreak.  

Finally, PEKKA’s advocacy and grassroots organizing culminated in a breakthrough in June of 2020 when the Indonesian government finally updated the nomenclature to include PEKKA, women-headed families, within the Ministry of Village Affairs. Due to PEKKA’s hard work and commitment, an astonishing 19 million female heads of households were granted the legal recognition and financial support they deserved and desperately needed.  

Now that women are recognized in the system as heads of households, they can be officially invited to all village meetings that in the past, were exclusively attended by male elites and those closest to the village heads. This means that women quite literally have a seat at the table when discussing budgets, community development, and marginalized groups’ needs.  

Scaling Deep: Modifying Mindsets   

While policy reform is an essential aspect of this battle, Nani also knew a vital component to tackling this issue lies in social mechanisms impeding the progress, mobility, and ambitions of Indonesian women. 

Mindsets that women do not have the capacity to lead have been molded by formal policies, such as the marriage law that specified heads of families are men and more informal systems like social and religious values that tie a woman’s worth to her role as a wife, caregiver, and mother.  

Nani noted, “There is a lot of stigma on divorced women and also widows, single women, those  who try to assert themselves to take leadership positions.”   

Denying that women have the capacity to be leaders in their communities and families makes Indonesian women’s lives extremely challenging. As Nani explained, “Every human has the potential to lead, leaders are not only men.”   

Additionally, Nani believes women face another, more surprising obstacle: their own mindsets.  

“We realized that actually sometimes, we ourselves, as women, accept the injustice,” Nani explained. “We then create this sustained process when we are treated poorly because we do not fight. We don’t break the boundaries; we don’t cross the line because we are afraid of maybe losing our husband, or we are afraid of people looking at us like [bad women].”  

With a population of almost 270 million people and one out of four families being led by a single woman, by this definition, the number of “bad” women in Indonesia is staggering.  

“It was important to realize that I am not alone in facing that kind of situation. There are millions [who face this]. That is why, first of all, we needed to share stories but also listen. We needed to build our own understanding, critically, of why this is happening to us.”  

Conclusion 

Unless current, limiting definitions of power are upended, trailblazing women like Nani will continue being excluded from the conversation on pressing issues, such as women’s legal recognition as heads of their families. On a larger level, it is vital to redefine how success is measured to include the profound impact Nani has achieved over the past decade fighting for women’s rights in Indonesia.  

After almost two decades of work later, the collective impact Nani has made in Indonesia has been profound. Her achievements are rooted in her strategies: aiming for system change through policy reform and grassroots organizing to shift dominant mindsets.  

“I am a rebellion,” Nani confidently concluded.

Credit: PEKKA.com
Indonesia: Women Headed Household Empowerment Program (PEKKA)
Nani Zulminarni