Nani Zulminarni has always been concerned with injustice, inequality, and invisibility regarding women-headed households in Indonesia. Her personal journey confronted her with the reality that women’s legal rights were inextricably tied to their marital status when she divorced her husband in 2000 and experienced the stigma surrounding single women socially, economically, and legally. She said,” I am not alone in this; we are millions.”
She recognized the layers of the system dynamics that identified the status quo of the Indonesian women-headed households and identified them as “invisible power” and “visible power”. The visible power manifests in the law that states that men are the head of the family and have all of the authority; this is reflected in the laws and the regulations which dictate the status quo of women. The invisible power is the informal structure of society, and how people perceive the religious regulations and apply them. It is also embedded in the ability of women to organize themselves and perceive themselves as agents of change and leaders of their families.
Nani established Women-Headed Families (PEKKA), as a system change solution to the restrictive status quo for women in Indonesia. As statistics show, out of every four families, one is headed by a woman with a different condition either: widowed, divorced, single, abandoned, or a woman in a polygamous marriage. Most of these women share a very similar experience of stigmatization. She wanted the system to recognize women-headed households as leaders of their families. She embraced in this journey of change the values of justice, equality, and visibility. To move towards not only women’s empowerment but also achieving these values, she created a structured and comprehensive vision consisting of three levels: scaling deep, scaling up, and scaling out.
Nani wanted to create a paradigm shift in the power dynamics of the leading role of the woman in her family and society. She scaled deep by changing women’s perception of themselves, which resulted in changing laws afterward. Nani created a community-based data collection movement where women are tellers of their stories. She utilized the power of storytelling to change the narrative through structured and systemic vision. Nani hired young women who needed jobs, trained them for months, and empowered them with the required tools and knowledge to document the status quo of women in Indonesia to present this data to the government. PEKKA organized over 70,000 women across Indonesia to demand change. Nani realized that when women share their experiences, both struggles, and successes, they better understand the layers of power that control their lives and how to change it.
This organic and organized community led by PEEKA was able to highlight that the effect of the Marriage Law of 1974 has a more significant impact on the invisibility of women where around 60% of marriages aren’t registered; this meant the absence of women’s rights and their legal identity. This significant absence of marital registrations was due to a combination of barriers: a lack of information surrounding the process, expensive court fees, and distant registration locations.
Nani wanted to further work on the visibility of women. She advocated with her team to make reforms that increase the accessibility of women across Indonesia. A new “mobile courts” system was implemented in villages across Indonesia, sending legal representatives to hard-to-reach communities. To lower the high costs, PEKKA helped pass a regulation establishing a registration fee waiver for low-income communities. Additionally, PEKKA’s data showed there were 40 million children who, since their mothers do not have their own legal identity, do not possess birth certificates. Due to PEKKA and its alliances’ advocacy work, the government set up a “one-stop service system” where not only marriages and divorces could be registered, but children could also receive birth certificates.
In June 2020, the Indonesian government added PEKKA, or women-headed families, to policies within the Ministry of Village Affairs. Due to Nani’s dedication and her team in PEKKA to this cause, 19 million female heads of households were granted the legal recognition and financial support they deserved and needed. They also benefited from a social status upgrade: now that women-headed household are recognized officially, they can attend all village meetings which, in the past, were exclusively attended by male elites and those closest to the village heads.
You can see the numbers here: 70,000 women organized agents of change, 19 million visible women, and 40 million children now have birth certificates; these numbers mean that the results of scaling deep and working on the social dynamics to create equality and empowerment, and scaling up by working on the visible power to enforce new laws went beyond a particular group and now scaled out and affected millions across Indonesia.
In the WISE theory of change, the three angles of the triangle: scaling up, scaling deep, and scaling out, are achieved in PEKKA, which means that Nani Zulminarni changed the lives of Indonesian women and children for generations to come.
