Has decentralisation affected child immunisation status in Indonesia?

The past two decades have seen many countries, including a number in Southeast Asia, decentralising their health system with the expectation that this reform will improve their citizens' health. However, the consequences of this reform remain largely unknown.

This study analyses the effects of fiscal decentralisation on child immunisation status in Indonesia.

We used multilevel logistic regression analysis to estimate these effects, and multilevel multiple imputation to manage missing data. The 2011 publication of Indonesia's national socio-economic survey (Susenas) is the source of household data, while the Podes village census survey from the same year provides village-level data. We supplement these with local government fiscal data from the Ministry of Finance.

The findings show that decentralising the fiscal allocation of responsibilities to local governments has a lack of association with child immunisation status and the results are robust. The results also suggest that increasing the number of village health centres (posyandu) per 1,000 population improves probability of children to receive full immunisation significantly, while increasing that of hospitals and health centres (puskesmas) has no significant effect.

These findings suggest that merely decentralising the health system does not guarantee improvement in a country's immunisation coverage. Any successful decentralisation demands good capacity and capability of local governments.