IRC to document progress in nine district sanitation and hygiene programmes in Indonesia

Building on recent participatory hygiene work on community levels in Indonesia IRC has entered into a strategic partnership with SIMAVI to assist local monitoring and documenting progress in sanitation and hygiene programmes of nine districts in Indonesia. The Sanitation, Hygiene And Water project (SHAW, or WASH in reverse) is a five-year project to assist nine districts in the Indonesian provinces of NTT, Papua Barat and Papua, in the poorest Eastern part of Indonesia.

The 2010- 2014 project is carried out within STBM, Indonesia’s national programme for Community-Led Total Sanitation with five ‘pillars’ on sanitation and hygiene practices. Within STBM, SHAW is looking at further developing Indonesia’s innovative approaches to promoting, monitoring and documenting behavioural change in sanitation and hygiene and building district and village capacities for developing, implementing and managing well-sustained district-wide sanitation and hygiene programmes.

Budget of 19 million Euros, various sources

SHAW partners are (in alphabetic order): CD Bethesda, IRC, Plan Indonesia, Rumsram, SIMAVI, UNICEF, WASTE and Yayasan Dian Desa (UDD). Progress and outcome in behavioural change will be monitored and shared at district, provincial and national level to reinforce sector management and for replication. The total budget of this five year programme is € 19 million of which € 8.1 is contributed by the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the remainder shared by the local communities, the local government and SIMAVI, a Dutch NGO.

Within the partnership IRC is responsible for monitoring and documentation support to the local NGOs. The work load over five years amounts to EUR 380,000.

Better local monitoring system needed

Indonesia has created a country-wide rural sanitation, STBM (Indonesian for Community-Led Total Sanitation), with five behavioural “pillars” on sanitation and hygiene. As yet, there is no good monitoring system. The monitoring observed in the field was a government reporting system. The community health worker (CHW) at the local health post keeps/adjusts the list of who has built/upgraded toilets in the last month and passes the data to the community level. The health centre official enters and aggregates the data in an electronic data sheet for the whole community (but still organized by hamlet). The data sheet is the typical government reporting sheet, which does not encourage local analysis. Village leaders currently do not use the data for analysing trends, comparing performance between hamlets etc. although technically this is possible.

The government and UNICEF expect that the SHAW programme will contribute to a different and better kind of monitoring system for sanitation and hygiene. In a first workshop the indicators and outline of the monitoring system were agreed.

Follow up work

 The SHAW partners have agreed to organize three programme workshops in the inception phase:
 - a three-day practical planning workshop with staff from the implementing NGOs on selection of villages, criteria, facilitation, funds etc. that should result in a Project Implementation Document;
 - a 10-day institutional workshop on concepts and strategy of promotion of sanitation and hygiene with NGOs and district representatives, which should result in an implementation plan;
 - a review workshop of the draft inception report.
 

Learning and sharing

 As part of our learning and sharing role in the project IRC produced a CD with all materials and photos and established a bilingual internal project site. Indonesia partners take care of translations.
 Expected other contributions to the local NGOs from IRC include: coaching on tools development, and the completion of the participatory monitoring system.