Developing city sanitation strategies in Indonesia

The Government of Indonesia has long regarded sanitation as a private matter, and public investments in sanitation infrastructure and services have been negligible. Barely 1% of the population has access to sewerage and while most households have a toilet, many of these discharge into open drains, canals, rivers and ponds.

The government has adopted national sanitation goals in line with the Millennium Development Goals but has not, so far, developed a strategy for meeting them in urban areas. Municipalities are under little pressure to improve sanitation services and have difficulty accessing funds should they decide to do so. Where improvements are undertaken, they tend to be piecemeal and unconnected to a strategic plan for the city as a whole.

The Indonesia Sanitation Sector Development Program (ISSDP) is a Netherlands funded program implemented by Government of Indonesia and the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program - East Asia and the Pacific (WSP-EAP) with consulting support of DHV B.V. The program is an innovative response to an evolving urban sanitation crisis; instead of funding new sanitation investments directly, it fosters an enabling environment for progress, with special attention to planning, capacity building and institutional arrangements at city and provincial level; policy and strategy at national level; plus advocacy and awareness-raising at all levels.

At the end of the first, two year phase, government ownership of the program is strong and a distinct shift is evident in the sector. Each of the six municipalities involved i.e. Phase 1 of ISSDP has produced a City-wide Sanitation Strategy and urban sanitation is starting to gain the profile it deserves on the national development agenda.

This paper examines the city level planning and capacity building process which is at the heart of ISSDP and is helping to signal the way forward for sector policy and strategy. Central to the process are collaboration between the various government organisations involved in sanitation at municipal level, and the identification of prioritised, affordable actions that will enable the cities to move steadily towards effective services, city-wide.