Age-friendly Communities and Regional Disparity: The Case of Indonesia

NADIA VIOLA ANGESTI, Prof. Dr. Muhadjir Darwin

2021 | Skripsi | S1 MANAJEMEN DAN KEBIJAKAN PUBLIK

Contemporarily, as older people tend to live longer and healthier, gerontology's central theme has been enacting age-friendly communities to ensure every elderly can live well despite their different life trajectories and choices. In Indonesia, which just began its demographic dividend, population aging seems like a matter of the future. Nevertheless, with a few regions have already aged, an immense projected grey population, and regional disparity only complicate efforts to ensure older people are not left out of development plans currently implemented for the dividend. Yet, despite its high awareness, efforts in enacting age-friendliness within society are still limited. Literature has also been predominated with general overviews on age-friendliness, with a small part is of regional-based assessments. Still, so far, nation-wide assessment that examines the implementation of regulations related to age-friendliness has been lacking if not outdated. This study seeks to fill that gap. Employing scoping review, this study seeks to map the progress of age-friendliness in national structure of Indonesia by utilizing synthesis table of age-friendliness dimensions sourced from globally recognized models before also discussing what hassles the progress. From the result, while there is a commendable progress in the dimensions of healthcare, mobility, and information, Indonesia is only 18.03% age-friendly, mainly caused by unequal accessibility despite policy provision. Regulations have been preliminary and not propped with sufficient actions, particularly to ensure equality as 60% of inequality can be traced back to regional disparity. This disparity reveals that Indonesia is structurally able to construct necessary policy but lack in efforts to equally distribute them to all regions.

Contemporarily, as older people tend to live longer and healthier, gerontology's central theme has been enacting age-friendly communities to ensure every elderly can live well despite their different life trajectories and choices. In Indonesia, which just began its demographic dividend, population aging seems like a matter of the future. Nevertheless, with a few regions have already aged, an immense projected grey population, and regional disparity only complicate efforts to ensure older people are not left out of development plans currently implemented for the dividend. Yet, despite its high awareness, efforts in enacting age-friendliness within society are still limited. Literature has also been predominated with general overviews on age-friendliness, with a small part is of regional-based assessments. Still, so far, nation-wide assessment that examines the implementation of regulations related to age-friendliness has been lacking if not outdated. This study seeks to fill that gap. Employing scoping review, this study seeks to map the progress of age-friendliness in national structure of Indonesia by utilizing synthesis table of age-friendliness dimensions sourced from globally recognized models before also discussing what hassles the progress. From the result, while there is a commendable progress in the dimensions of healthcare, mobility, and information, Indonesia is only 18.03% age-friendly, mainly caused by unequal accessibility despite policy provision. Regulations have been preliminary and not propped with sufficient actions, particularly to ensure equality as 60% of inequality can be traced back to regional disparity. This disparity reveals that Indonesia is structurally able to construct necessary policy but lack in efforts to equally distribute them to all regions.

Kata Kunci : population aging, age-friendly community, inequality, Indonesia