I grew up in a village at the border of Indonesia and Malaysia. Growing up on the margins of a nation gives you a certain sense of distance — not just physical distance from the capital, but distance from opportunity, infrastructure, and public services that many take for granted. In places like mine, greed is not an abstract discussion talked about in classrooms, educating the young, or during policy forums. It’s in the roads we drive on, the hospitals we rely on and the schools we go to.
I found out about inequality in my family. A years ago my brother got very sick with something called pleural effusion. This is when fluid builds up around the lungs and it can be fatal if you do not get treatment. We lived in a city but there were no doctors who could help my brother. There were no lung specialists, not equipment to diagnose problems and no good hospitals where you could get the care you need. Every time my brother went to the hospital it was a worry. My brother needed medical care but we did not have access, to it because of where we lived. At last, my family made a choice that many border families quietly make: we went into Malaysia for medical treatment. The difference was immediate and it was clear. My brother’s prognosis had improved dramatically within half a year. He was treated by specialists with advanced medical technology and under a more cohesive healthcare system. What seemed like a neverending crisis at home was under control, on the other side of the border. “That’s when I realized how much geography can influence health outcomes.” The invisible line that separates two countries did exist on the ground however, and it dictated what level of care was accessible to my brother.
Healthcare wasn’t the only divide I saw as I grew up. Education in my city was no exception to this. For many students, going to school means going over geography – literally – every day. Some made river-crossings by boat each morning before sunrise. Others depended on trucks going to town – they get “menumpang” (hitch a ride) because no public transportation takes them from their villages to their schools. During the rainy season, these trips were even more unpredictable. The work of simply being in a classroom, physically, already called for tenacity, and that, too, was before learning began. The inequities were brought into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic. My friends and I, in smaller cities, were faced with a different reality as students in the urban centers moved to online learning. In certain regions, even the electricity was erratic, or they lacked it. Internet weak or nada. Some friends made temporary moves to adjacent sub-districts just to access a strong enough network to attend virtual classes. Education that had previously needed physical stamina now needed digital access that our region simply did not possess. The pandemic exposed yet another stratum: the digital divide. Access to the internet and stable electricity is still a luxury. In a day and age when education is increasingly tied to connectivity, that gap aggravates inequality of access.
But numbers alone don’t capture the feeling of what it is like.
It feels like watching your brother take easier breaths in a different country.
It feels like rising before dawn and not to study, but to find a ride. ” It feels like discovering, at age sixteen, that what you had once considered to be “normal” was in fact a structural cleft.
There are people in my hometown who are not ambitious. They’re just relentless, if anything, they are more relentless. But you should never have to be resilient in order to get access to healthcare or education.
“You shouldn’t have to live at the border to have the opportunity to live.” “It should be going out to the very margins, and if development means progress it truly should go out there – not just to the centre.”
I haven’t even factored in the whole issue of how poor quality infrastructure, small laboratory facilities, old textbooks, or availability of trained teachers in subject areas all play a role. The difference with bigger cities — particularly those on Java Island where there is a concentration of resources — was stark.
I had the chance to study abroad in the United States when I was sixteen. I was young, but I knew enough to know very well what I was looking at. The schools there had reliable power and broadband; they had labs and libraries and networks for getting kids into college. Medical care services were specialized and institutionalized. The emergency response is well-oiled. Pathways of education were underpinned by institutional strength. They were “able to compare two systems clearly, not just compare two individual experiences, for the first time”, they are not just looking at two separate sets of data. It wasn’t Anaya’s or Sphen’s or (speaking more broadly) Junior Gonzalez’s apparent laziness or stupidity. But it’s about infrastructure, and policy, and institutional capacity. I started to realize that what I’d come to see as my experiences growing up were not random bad luck, but instead were examples of systemic inequality.
Why Do These Gaps Persist?
A structural and data driven analysis is needed to explain education and healthcare gaps in border areas of Indonesia. Several interrelated issues account for the persistence of these gaps.
1. Core–Periphery Development Patterns
Indonesia’s development has been traditionally shaped by the core–periphery layout. Concentrated on the Java Island, which is where more than half of the country’s population live and where a dominant share of the national GDP is generated, are economic activities, higher education establishments, specialised hospitals and also experienced person. According to national data, cities such as Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bandung have an overconcentration of healthcare professionals and high-level referral hospitals. Specialist doctors are also much scarcer in peripheral areas – particularly in border and rural regions.
This geographic clustering results in disparities in access to quality care. Unlike the urban dwellers who are able to take advantage of economies of scale and robust institutional arrangements, people in the periphery must deal with dearth of services. 2 Fiscal Capacity and the Limits of Decentralization
Since the decentralization reforms introduced in 2001, the local governments have been given the administrative responsibility of education and healthcare provision. Yet fiscal capacity is extraordinarily diverse. Towns with a very limited tax base and little business activity depend heavily on contributions from the central government. The rural and border counties often cannot raise sufficient local funds to furnish upgraded hospitals, develop digital infrastructure, or finance teacher training.
Even with equalization funds in place, the logistical cost of doing business way out in the boondocks is so high. Planning, constructing and maintaining transportation and utility infrastructure in such topographically and geographically challenging locations as rivers and forests, and in mountainous terrain also requires more capital per capita than in a heavily urbanized environment.
2. Human Resource Maldistribution
Skilled: USS 160 million Indonesia’s skilled professionals are unevenly spread. Specialist doctors, veteran teachers, and technical officers overwhelmingly prefer urban placements where they have access to better facilities, opportunities for career progression, superior living conditions. Though government initiatives seek to send professionals to isolated areas, keeping them is a problem.
As a result, the cycle is: professionals don’t stay in places with minimal facilities, and the lack of professionals means no further investment in infrastructure. Service quality is thus at best stalled. 4. Access and Infrastructure in the Context of the Digital Divide. The COVID-19 disruption showed up the divide between those who have and do not have access to internet in Indonesia. The use of the internet in rural areas and in the eastern region of the country is significantly lower than the percentages among the urban population around the country. Electricity access is also not consistently dependable. Without digital infrastructure, students are left out of online learning, they cannot become digitally literate, and they are deprived of access to the global information networks.
In the long run, such digital inequality perpetuates economic inequality, as technological know-hows increasingly become a key factor of labor market competitiveness.
3. Political Economy and Policy Prioritization
Public investment is said to follow political salience and economic returns. Urban centers produce more economic output and political clout, so they are natural focal points of infrastructure investment. Marginal areas, in particular thinly populated borderlands, may be the focus of (sometimes quite substantial) attention in terms of sovereignty and security, but not always in terms of sustained social investment in education and health care systems. Conclusion Growing up on the border taught me that inequality is about place, but studying abroad taught me that it is about systems. The healthcare and educational disparities I saw are not attributable to personal inadequacy or not wanting to try. They are the results of patterns of uneven development, fiscal inequality, infrastructure constraints, and institutional agglomeration.
When a family has to cross an international border to get medical care, it’s not just a personal choice; it shows that the system is not working right. When students wade through rivers or move temporarily to get to the internet, it means more than just being tough; it shows that the system has been abandoned. If a country is to be judged not only by how its wealthier center fares, but also in how it treats its margins, then these are not just policy voids to be filled. It’s a matter of justice.
By: Adinda Aisyah Nindyani
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