Water supply and sanitation in Indonesia

Over 100 million people in Indonesia lack access to safe water and more than 70 percent of the country’s 220 million population relies on water obtained from potentially contaminated sources. ^[1] The Government of Indonesia is committed to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In order to do so, an estimated 78 million more people will require improved water supply and 73 million improved sanitation services by 2015. ^[2]

While there are no nationally accepted criteria to define "sustainable access", currently only about 47 percent of the population has access to water from improved sources considered relatively safe accodring to Indonesia's 2004 socio-economic survey(SUSENAS). That includes 42 percent of the urban and 51 percent of the rural population. In the 8 years from 1994 to 2002, this figure increased by only 10 percent in rural areas and 9 percent in the urban. At this rate, by 2015, only about 56 percent of the rural population can be expected to gain access to safe water supply, when the MDG target for the whole country is 73 percent.

Population access to improved sanitation in rural areas has remained stagnant at around 38 percent since 1985 according to the Joint Monitoring Program. ^[3]

More than 40 percent of rural households use unsanitary open pits or defecate in fields, beaches and water bodies. Urban sanitation is the least well addressed of major policy issues in Indonesia. Poor sanitation in cities and small towns is posing population health hazards through pollution of both ground and surface water sources used by urban populations for a variety of purposes. Disposal and treatment of sewage is available for less than 5% of the population. Top-down delivery systems of the past have led to the poor not gaining appreciable access to safe sanitation services in both urban and rural areas. ^[4]

About 30 percent of the water distributed by water companies in the country is contaminated with E.coli or fecal coliform and other pathogens. ^[5]

Unsafe drinking water is a major cause of diarrhea, which is the second leading killer of children under five in the country and accounts for about 20 percent of child deaths each year. Every year, at least 300 out of 1,000 Indonesians suffer from water-borne diseases, including cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever, according to the Ministry of Health. ^[6] Economic losses due to inadequate sanitation alone were estimated at 2.4% of GDP in 2002. Significant damage to the country's future potential in terms of infant mortality and child malnutrition in low-income areas of Indonesia is greatly associated with inadequate access to safe water and basic sanitation. ^[7]

People in Jakarta spend significant resources on boiling water to make it drinkable. Indonesian women report spending more than 100,000 rupees or 11 dollars a month on kerosene for boiling water. However, a new system to treat drinking water at the household level without boiling has cut down on these costs and reduces health risks among women and children.

The system, called “Air Rahmat” or “gift water,” is produced by a private-public partnership called Aman Tirta. Members of Aman Tirta include the Johns Hopkins’ Center for Communication Programmes and CARE International Indonesia. The brand name refers to a liquid 1.25 percent sodium hypochlorite solution which is effective in deactivating micro-organisms such as E.coli in water. The solution is originally developed as part of the Safe Water Systems program of the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When used correctly in conjunction with proper storage, the water treatment solution has been shown to reduce the risk of diarrhea up to 85 percent. Air Rahmat is also able to protect water for two to three days from recontamination. The solution is easy to use by adding three milliliters of Air Rahmat for every 20 liters of water, shaking or stirring for 30 seconds, and waiting for at least 30 minutes until the water is ready to drink. ^[8]

Deteriorating quality and quantity of primary water sources has reached critical proportions in the most densely populated islands like Java and Bali - which are home to the largest numbers of the country's poor. ^[9]

The Indonesia Environment Monitor notes that Indonesia ranks among the worst countries in Asia in sewerage and sanitation coverage. Few Indonesian cities possess even minimal sanitation systems. For example, according to a 2002 World Bank report, ^[10] less than 3% of Jakarta's population is connected to a sewer system. The absence of an established sanitation network forces many households to rely upon private septic tanks or to dispose of their waste directly into rivers and canals. The commonality of the latter practice has led to significant contamination of Indonesia's surface and groundwater, as well as to repeated epidemics of gastrointestinal infections. As of 2001, an estimated 90% of Jakarta's shallow wells were polluted by domestic waste.^[11]

The responsibility for policy and regulation of the water and sanitation sector in Indonesia is shared between the Ministry of Health, which focuses primarily on rural areas, and the Ministry of Home Affairs, which focuses more on urban areas.

The provision of water and sanitation services in urban areas is the responsibility of PDAMs (Perusahaan Daerah Air Minum), Local Government Owned Water Utilities. There are 306 PDAMs in Indonesia. Two (Jakarta and North Sumatra) operate at provincial government level. All others operate at district government level.^[12] There are also a few utilities dedicated exclusively to sanitation, called PD-PAL or Local Government Owned Wastewater Utilities.

Utilities are associated in Perpamsi, the national association of water utilities. In 2002 it initiated a performance benchmarking program with support from the World Bank. The data base currently contains 80 Water Utilities (PDAM) in Indonesia, including most of the larger ones. ^[13]

Rural Indonesia has a long history of community-managed water supply services using naturally occurring springs, rainwater and groundwater sources. However, community capacities to sustain such water systems over long periods have tended to be limited. Past rural water supply and sanitation projects have often not invested sufficiently in building community capacity to plan, implement, operate and maintain services in ways that benefit and satisfy all sections of rural societies, conditions necessary for service sustainability. Rural consumers have not consistently been offered voice and choice in decisions related to establishing and managing services and paying for them. Services have often been provided in a top-down manner by agencies external to the community, using public sector or donor funds and contractors answerable to government agencies rather than to the users of services. This has led to mismatches between what the users want and get, a lack of community ownership of rural water supply and sanitation facilities and unclear responsibilities for maintenance.

In 2003 the government adopted a new sector policy that provides a clear route map for sector reform, by:

• Radically changing the policy goals for the sector, from achieving "coverage targets" counted in terms of construction of systems facilities, to the twin goals of sustainability and effective use of water supply and sanitation services;
• Promoting water as a public as well as an economic good;
• Espousing strategies such as empowerment of communities to choose, co-finance, construct and manage and own their WSS services;
• Requiring the use of gender-and poverty-sensitive approaches in working with and empowering user communities to ensure poverty targeting and impact on local poverty;
• Building stakeholders' understanding at all levels of the multi-dimensional nature of service sustainability;
• Measuring success in terms of sustained population access to services, and effective use of those services, i.e. hygienic and health - promoting use of services by all sections of communities and improved sanitation and hygiene behaviors among various age-sex groups of the population.

The new sector policy framework has yet to be operationalized on a large scale. In addition, emerging experience in recent years with the new generation of community-demand driven projects shows that for long-term sustainability of services,community management alone may not be an adequate arrangement. Newer models of support and responsibility sharing between user communities and local governments or local private sector agencies need to be evolved and tested.^[14]

Non-revenue water in Indonesia’s best utilities stands at only 20%, while the worst quartile of utilities participating in Perpamsi’s benchmarking exercise have NRW of 43%. In terms of labor productivity, the best performing utilities have a staff ratio of 4 per 1000 connections, while utilities in the worst quartile have more than 9 staff per 1000 connections.^[15]

As in many other countries, those not connected to water supply networks pay the most for water. A survey in North Jakarta found the price of water was $2.62/m3 for vendor customers, $1.26/m3 for standpipe customers, $1.08/m3 for household resales customers, and only $0.18/m3 for connected households. ^[16]

In the Five-Year Development Plan 1994-1999 (Repelita V) US$ 1.38 bn were allocated to water supply and US$ 590 million to sanitation. ^[17] The required investments to meet MDG are around US$450 million per year, up from the current level of investment of about US$50 million per year.^[18] Actual investments in water supply and sanitation through the regular national budget stood at only US$ 124m per year (average of 2004-2005).^[19]

Investments are financed by the national government (through the regular budget and through a special allocation budget) as well as by local government.

Since decentralization in the year 2001, local Governments have typically invested less than 2 percent of their annual budgets on water supply, even less on sanitation and almost nothing on improving hygiene practices.^[20]

The economic crisis of the late 1990s severely curtailed investment in infrastructure. Central government spending on development dropped from US$14 billion in 1994 to US$5 billion in 2002, within which the share of infrastructure spending further declined from 57 to 30 percent over the same period. Moreover, poor institutional and regulatory frameworks and rampant corruption in the infrastructure sector, which were prevalent even before the crisis, continued without serious sector reform efforts by the government until very recently. ^[21]

The Third Water Supply and Sanitation for Low Income communities Project for Indonesia aims to increase the number of low-income rural and peri-urban populations accessing improved water and sanitation facilities and practicing improved hygiene behaviors. It will support community driven development (CDD) planning and management of water, sanitation and hygiene improvement programs, build stakeholder commitment and expand the capacity of central, provincial and district government agencies. It will also ensure that targeted community households gain access to improved sanitation facilities of their choice, are using improved water supply and sanitation infrastructure effectively and are progressively adopting key hygiene practices. Finally, it will provide participating communities with a menu of technical options for rural water supply and public sanitation infrastructure. The project is implemented by the Ministry of Health. ^[22]

About 3 million people in Indonesia, living in about 30 cities in 11 provinces, will directly benefit from improved piped water supply partly financed by a US$66 million loan approved in 1997 by the Asian Development Bank to support a Capacity Building of Water Supply Enterprises for Water Loss Reduction Sector Project. The project will help strengthen the capacity of selected water supply enterprises to reduce water losses on a sustained basis and rehabilitate water supply systems in these cities, and thereby increase the revenue of water enterprises and enable them to provide better service to new and existing consumers. The Directorate General of Public Administration and Regional Autonomy of the Ministry of Home Affairs is the executing agency for the project.^[23]

ADB will provide clean water and sanitation facilities to about 1,500 communities of rural Indonesia, including tsunami-affected areas, through an assistance package approved in April 2005 comprising loans amounting to US$64.7 million and $16.5 million in an emergency assistance grant. The Community Water Services and Health Project will target 1,000 communities in 20 districts in the provinces of West and Central Kalimantan, Jambi, and Bengkulu, where the project will provide about 1.2 million people with safe drinking water and about half of these with improved sanitation. An additional five districts consisting of 500 communities in Aceh and Nias-North Sumatra affected by the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami disaster will be covered under a complementary emergency assistance grant package. The Government's National Policy for the Development of Community-Managed Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation Facilities and Services highlights the need for a demand-responsive approach to rural water supply and sanitation. The project will give local governments the capacity to plan sustainable investments. It will also conduct advocacy and awareness training among the communities to build capacity for them to operate and maintain new water and sanitation facilities that will be built through the project. To maximize the health impact of the project investments, the project will finance hygiene promotion at schools, religious facilities, and among the communities. The Directorate General of Communicable Disease Control and Environmental Health of the Ministry of Health is the executing agency of the project ^[24]

Since early 2005 USAID has provided technical assistance to water utilities (PDAMs) in Java and Sumatra on issues related to full cost recovery tariffs and improved technical operation, with the objective of improving their creditworthiness and ability to borrow to meet network expansion needs. USAID is also looking at ways to use its partial credit guarantee mechanism to further increase local water utilities’ access to commercial financing. ^[25]

CARE Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) support the CARE-Sulawesi Rural Community Development Project (SRCD). The emphasis of the SRCD project is as much on developing the rural communities as it is on providing water supply and improving sanitation. CARE uses the "community management approach", by which communities are heavily involved right from the very beginning, from the design through construction, implementation, operation and maintenance.

The approach works by establishing a village water committee and a series of sub-committees: for example, sanitation, construction and finance. The village itself decides how it will raise the amount of money needed for its contribution to the project. This is usually done by monthly levy whereby each family contributes a small amount of money over the course of four to six months. The village construction committee also organizes the labour to install the system. All the labour is done manually without the use of heavy machinery, which means a low environmental impact and lower cost. With water close at hand, most households are also building their own simple latrines. ^[26]

The public Dutch water company Water Supply Company Drenthe (WMD) and Dutch development aid support various water companies in Eastern Indonesia. Joint venture contracts have been concluded with four companies (Ambon, Bacau (Maluku), Biak, Sorong (Irian Jaya/Papua), negotiations are going on with seven other companies in North Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua. The WMD has reserved 3.4 million euros for the project. These amounts are intended to fund the first five years. aid to the costs of the project. The WMD has reserved 3.4 million euros for the project. These amounts are intended to fund the first five years. ^[27]

UNICEF supports the Indonesian government in developing and implementing strategies that improve drinking water and sanitation conditions across the country. UNICEF also assists the government in improving relevant planning mechanisms, monitoring systems and databases. UNICEF continues to play a pivotal role as the water and sanitation sectoral coordinator for the post-tsunami response in Aceh and North Sumatra, developing partnership frameworks that pool competencies and resources across organizations. ^[28]