Peduli Anak » The Making of A National Database for Children

The Making of A National Database for Children

17 October 2011

The Ministry of Social Affairs, in collaboration with Peduli Anak Foundation and Bina Nusantara University, is planning to develop a national social services database for children, families, and government/non-government organizations under the Ministry's social welfare system. The World Bank has recently committed to supporting the Child Social Welfare Program (PKSA) and the database as well.

The Founder of Peduli Anak, Chaim Fetter, has discussed closely with the Director of Child Social Services, Dr. Harry Hikmat about the need of having for an online database as the center of information and supervising tool for the government to improve the quality of the social welfare programs in Indonesia.

Peduli Anak has contributed to the birth of the PKSA website (www.pksa-kemensos.com) which records not only progress of the program but also the data of children, social workers, and organizations in PKSA.

The key feature of the new database allows all data of children in the social welfare system to be recorded and updated regularly by the organization responsible for the children. In addition to the care children receive through government/non-government organizations, the data of adopted children and adoptive parents, foster children and foster parents, and missing children can also be found there.

Government or non-government organizations like Peduli Anak, can upload the data of children and social workers and update it regularly in order to be eligible for government support. Organizations can also upload proposals for funding via the database. All proposals will go through three screenings, first at the municipal level, second at the provincial level, and the final decision will be made by the Ministry.

Monitoring and supervision are important parts for a successful program. All data of children must be supported by a valid record of a school report and any identification or legal documents of the child and parent/guardian. Organizations are responsible for the validity of the children’s information and the updates of their children. This data will only be visible to the organization and the Ministry as the administrator of the database.

"From that process, it will be easy to see whether organizations are reputable. This will lead to another key feature of the database, which is the accreditation system. Organizations that fail to provide regular updates and reports, for example, no information about their child's school report, will be suspended and could be discontinued from government support," explained Chaim. Harry added, "we will make an independent accreditation team to check and visit organizations based on standard requirements for child care outlined and rate the accreditation level of the organizations." This may result in organizations being "blacklisted" due to poor or false data and reporting systems or other misuse of program benefits. Thus, they will be marked and ineligible for funding

By the end of 2011, our target is to build a system for an online proposal. The database team and the Director of Child Social Welfare estimate the national social services database will be fully functioning by next year.