Being the so called one of the emerging economy in the SEA region, Indonesia ironically still has a lot of homework to do. Widespread poverty, political instability, unequal distribution of resources, regional separatism, are at least some of the to-do list for the incumbent administration. Therefore, if you wonder which group of people are the least protected ones? The answer is right. They are of course children and women. In Indonesia, it is estimated that there are 73,000 babies that die every year within their first 28 days of being born. That means 200 babies die every day, and thus a baby dies every 7 minutes. And if those statistics are not shameful enough, two out 10 mothers were alone during deliveries without any help from trained and equipped birth attendances. The causes are complex, but the opportunity to revive from the crisis does exist.

Save the children has worked for more than 4 decades in Indonesia, fully committing to provide long term support to improve the quality of life of Indonesian children and their families. Amongst the initiatives and programs that have been conducted, Save the Children is fighting to raise the issue of newborn mortality particularly from the perspective of disparities in health access where Indonesia was placed at the 10th highest disparity of newborn mortality. This was worsened by the fact that Indonesia had to deal with serious shortage of qualified health workers mainly in rural areas which contributes to the high number of mortality due to the preventable causes.

To be fair, the current administration is trying to levy the problem; but it is not without its own set of challenges. The allocation of the new social security agency (BPJS) focusing on children and mother health was constrained in consequences of the low budget of national spending. This why it is important to raise the awareness in regards to the issue which ID Comm is responsible to assist with.

Our work with Save the children began by initiating the “7 Minutes” campaign as a starter to gather public support to the improvement of newborn lives and their conditions in Indonesia. This hopefully will also stimulate collaborative effort pertaining to this dreadful issue.

The “7 Minutes” campaign was accomplished with ID COMM’s set of communication strategy recommendation which contained the newborn mortality status, new cases, and causes. The campaign is a big deal for our team as we are accountable to strengthen Save the children position as a leading organization with a respectable portfolio in advocating mother and children issues in Indonesia. Our attempt at putting the campaign on the map utilized several approaches covering: hosting various press events to generate buzz, develop communication collaterals to ensure readily available material, community engagement to ensure that targeted audience are catered to, and media engagement to ensure that they are on board and understood the angle of the campaign to help spread the word.

Additionally, ID COMM also acted as a media center with main responsibility is to conduct a series of media activities, to invite media to the event, and to assist all media interview/inquiries.

Through ID COMM support, the series “7 Minutes” campaign has garnered participations from 21 media titles. This was later followed by several articles covered by top tier media titles, and It was claimed that more than 45 million people has been educated by the campaign.

It is unacceptable to legitimate low national allocation as a sorry excuse for a country not to make any necessary progress in tackling the issue. It is very unacceptable to regard the chances for babies to live solely depends on where he/she is born or who their parents are. By any and all sense, it is forever unacceptable that there are still babies who are born just to die. For us at ID COMM, being involved in this campaign was personal as much as it was professional.