The number of Indonesians recorded as having tested positive for COVID-19 reached more than 4,500 on Monday, after the first two cases were confirmed on March 2. Jakarta has recorded more than 2,100, making it the country’s COVID-19 epicenter.

The Jakarta Post reported on April 6 that a research study conducted by Katadata Insight Center showed an adequate number of healthcare facilities in the capital city, but not in other regions including West Java and Banten, portraying obstacles in the nation’s fight against COVID-19. Furthermore, a shortage of medical workers to run tests and provide treatment for the disease, as well as the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) for the medical workers pose other obstacles.

The government had eventually distributed PPE supplies from China to meet the increasing demand for the items, thus gearing up medical workers in their task to contain the spread of COVID-19. A similar step was taken by certain organizations including the Tanoto Foundation, who committed to donate millions of items of PPE sourced from China.

Tanoto Foundation, an independent family philanthropy organisation founded by Sukanto Tanoto and Tinah Bingei Tanoto in 1981, procured more than 30 tons of protective gear that arrived at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on a chartered Garuda Indonesia flight from Shanghai, China on Monday. The goods, coming as the third batch being delivered, are part of Tanoto Foundation’s donation to the Indonesian government.

Read more on article titled Tanoto Foundation joins global fight against COVID-19 through PPE donation on The Jakarta Post.

Getting a good night’s sleep is important and insufficient sleep has been linked to poor health in many studies. Analysing data collected from wearable trackers, researchers from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Precision Medicine (PRISM) and the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) recently demonstrated that chronic sleep deprivation is associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk markers and accelerated biological aging. Their findings have been published in the journal Communications Biology.

This research has been supported by Tanoto Foundation, an independent family philanthropy organisation founded by Sukanto Tanoto and Tinah Bingei Tanoto in 1981.

Read more

Jakarta Post – The conversation on early childhood education and development (ECED) has been gaining momentum, helped by our increasingly informed and coordinated approaches to champion human capital development and address stunting.

The Indonesian government has led the way with launching of the “first 1,000 days” movement in 2013 and the recent emphasis on the one-year preschool education as the minimum standard for regional governments. The government also launched a National Strategy to Accelerate Stunting Prevention in 2017, committing an estimated $14.6 billion to converge nutrition interventions across 514 districts and 98 cities. This created many opportunities for diverse stakeholders to contribute to and complement ECED efforts.

According to the Ministry of Health, approximately 30.8 per cent of Indonesia’s children under five suffer from stunted development, an improvement from 37.2 per cent in 2013. This figure, however, still reflects the persistently high prevalence of stunting – a pertinent issue in the nation’s journey in human capital development.

Access to and quality of early childhood services also vary significantly between geographies and social strata. A child born into a family from the richest quintile is 1.5x more likely to be enrolled in an early childhood center than a child from a family in the poorest quintile.

Uneven development across emerging economies has led to inequalities that exacerbate the impediments to developing good ECED programs. Indonesia is no exception. On the one hand, we can build the good momentum created by country’s sustained investment in human capital and the maximized development opportunities brought about by the demographic dividend in the next decade; on the other, we continue to observe Indonesia’s stubborn Gini coefficient (around 0.4) and relatively high figures in developmental delays, further worsened by the triple malnutrition burden.

We are all key stakeholders in human capital development. We should find ways in our different capacities to either support or participate in this endeavor.