Creating Social Recognition & Functional Visibility for Women-Led Families in Indonesia

The Social Innovation

Magnitude of the Problem, and its Root Causes

Millions of women in Indonesia are the sole breadwinners and decision-makers of their families — yet who are functionally invisible to the state- widows, divorcees, women abandoned by or married to incapacitated husbands, single mothers.

Officially, 9 million households (14.57%) in Indonesia are recorded as women-led. PEKKA's own 2012 community census — using the government's methodology, in the same villages — puts the real figure closer to 15 million families (23%), nearly double. Government data recorded 12% of families as women-led in the villages surveyed; PEKKA found 24% — same place, same time.  

That gap is not a statistical error. It is the consequence of a system built on assumptions that no longer reflect reality, and millions of women pay the price in denied services, rights and dignity. Women-led families account for 75% of Indonesia's poorest households; 57% are illiterate; 44% lack health insurance; fewer than 2% receive cash transfers they are legally entitled to.

During their participation in the Dela Program, co-created by Ashoka and IKEA Social Entrepreneurship in 2019, the PEKKA team highlighted the following key factors contributing to the magnitude of the problem:

• Sociocultural norms and religious interpretation: Indonesian marriage law defines the man as head of household and the woman as housewife — making women-led families socially stigmatised, legally ambiguous, and politically marginalised.
• A flawed data architecture: Indonesia's citizen data system uses "household" rather than "family" as its unit of analysis, missing the reality that divorced or widowed daughters often return to their parents' homes and constitute entirely separate families. Millions are undercounted before the policy conversation even begins.
• Public services gated by documents women don't have: Access to healthcare, welfare, and legal protection is tied to marriage-related documents that many women-led families simply lack. No document, no service.

Based on their systems change analysis, the PEKKA team made it a mission to change how Indonesia defines, counts, and registers women-led families in its official data systems — shifting from a "household" unit of analysis (which renders millions of women invisible) to a "family" unit that captures the reality on the ground. 

Strategy to Catalyze a Network of Changemakers towards the Targeted Mission

The strategy to improve data and representation for women-led households revolves around improving formal systems through a mix of bottom-up and top-down approaches.

Some of the tactics they deployed towards the mission as a part of the strategy include:  

1) Co-creating a Digital Community-Driven Data System with Local Government to Influence the National Government

Armed with its 2012 census evidence, PEKKA went looking for a willing institutional partner to pilot a digitised, participatory data system. They found one in a district head in West Kalimantan — Nani's home province — who was himself deeply frustrated by the gaps in his public service data. His district faced serious stunting rates, and he wanted to know exactly how many children were affected and how many pregnant women lacked access to prenatal care. PEKKA's approach matched his problem precisely.

Together, PEKKA's community women leaders and the district government's team designed and ran a pilot across several villages where PEKKA had strong community roots — supported by research institutions and technology partners including UN Pulse Lab and Telkomsel. PEKKA collected grassroots data, processed it, and presented findings in focused group discussions with government officers — iterating the system based on their feedback. The district head was so convinced by the results that he established a dedicated data unit within his office and embedded PEKKA's inputs into the district's own digitised data system. The pilot demonstrated a simple but powerful logic: when communities are supported to register themselves, data quality improves dramatically — and government services can reach people who were previously invisible.

The ripple effect extended beyond that one district. Other district heads in West Kalimantan, inspired by their peer's results, began adopting similar approaches — proof that peer influence among government officials can be as powerful a change mechanism as top-down policy reform.  

COVID-19 disrupted plans to scale nationally, yet the horizontal spread continued: PEKKA now operates in 27 provinces and  108 districts, using data as the constant currency of its government relationships, and participates as a formal consultant in Indonesia's national effort to build a unified "one big data" system.

"There's always situations where we don't expect it — COVID happened, governments change, interpretations shift. But the core of Ashoka is entrepreneurial. What is entrepreneurial? It's really to look at opportunity. When we have a challenge, we don't focus our energy on solving the problem — because we know this challenge is huge and you cannot really solve it alone. We drive our energy into looking for opportunities. As long as they support what system we want to change, we anticipate them, we adapt, we move. You have to be really entrepreneurial and strong in that."

2) Created a Replicable Model to Collaborate with Multiple Stakeholders to Influence and Involve the Community in Improving Data

Klik PEKKA is a community-led consultation clinic with a simple but powerful premise: many women-led families lack the ID cards, family cards, birth certificates, and marriage documentation they need to access public services — not because they are ineligible, but because the system never came to them. Klik PEKKA reverses that dynamic.

In a single-day event at district level,  

• PEKKA's community women leaders organize the space with support of multiple stakeholders— civil registration authorities, religious affairs officers, social affairs departments, research institutions, and universities under one roof.  
• Community members arrive without documents; many leave with ID cards, birth certificates for their children, and formally registered marriages — made visible to the state, often for the first time.  
• Religious affairs officers can formally register previously unregistered marriages on the spot;  
• Civil registration officials issue ID cards the same day.  
• Schools and youth organisations are engaged in parallel — ensuring that children of women-led families obtain the birth certificates they need to access education, and that young people understand and support the rights of women-led families in their communities.  

So far, 18 district government agencies, 2 universities and more than 10 other stakeholders have collaborated with Klik PEKKAs, supporting thousands of women/community members  

Klik PEKKA is not a parallel system — it is an experiment designed to showcase what is possible within the government system that already exists.  

The goal was never for government to adopt PEKKA's platform — but to convince them of the logic: that self-registration produces better, more honest data than top-down collection.  

"We experiment and we showcase to them. This is the way — you have to organise the community, build awareness of how important data is for them, encourage the community to actively register themselves, and make the system available for them to do so. The government actually has this kind of system, but it does not work because they don't inform the community. So, they adopt our system — they integrate Klik PEKKA into their own system."

When that logic lands, governments build the change themselves. Across 3 districts, local governments have embedded Klik PEKKA into their own service delivery strategies — funding it through local budgets and running it as their own initiative.  

This alignment is not coincidental: Klik PEKKA speaks directly to two of the Indonesian national government's own priorities — improving citizen data quality through its "one big data" initiative and strengthening decentralised public service delivery at district and village level. For local governments already under pressure to deliver better services with limited resources, Klik PEKKA offers a ready-made, community-powered solution that makes them look good and perform better.