Joint situation analysis, strategy development and where wanted field trials of pro-poor and gender-equitable community action are some of the key factors for the success of the monitoring and evaluation consultancy for the Indonesia Sanitation Sector Development Programme (ISSDP). It helped generate significant demand from other cities.
Published on: 04/02/2010
“We became involved in the right project at the right time and were given the space to do what we are good at in this type of project. IRC is particularly good at being flexible and creative and using participatory approaches, we worked with the right colleagues, we found ‘sanitation champions’ in the different cities, we got support from mayors and worked with some of them during their run-up to local elections”, answered Christine to one of the questions on key factors for success of the monitoring and evaluation consultancy for the Indonesia Sanitation Sector Development Programme (ISSDP) during a learning and sharing presentation at IRC.
“It was a demand-driven and city-driven project. First cities could see an ISSDP road show that was very successful in raising awareness and generating city invitations. They indicated their interest of participating in the programme and then began to link up with other cities. Interested cities pledged their own resources in exchange for free technical assistance (TA) from the ISSDP consultants. We assisted the city administration to do an assessment of the city situation together with health department and other city organisations, but the demand and planning resources came from them”, she continued.
The Indonesia Sanitation Sector Development Programme focused at city and provincial level to help cities develop city sanitation strategies that empower local men and women to plan and manage their own neighbourhood improvements and services. See for more http://www.irc.nl/page/45199.
“The first steps were getting the existing city sanitation working groups interested in decentralized and gender- and poor-inclusive sanitation services in and by the poor neighbourhoods themselves. The second step was to form a local city team in each city and help them identify what different groups already did on sanitation in these neighbourhoods and how well. The third step was to see how the approaches and lessons from them could be included in the city strategies and what improvements could be made. We could also test some innovative approaches together with high risk neighbourhoods and using local (city) funds.
Field visits offered an excellent insight in the existing approaches and the key issues for sustainability and impacts. We realized that neighbourhoods were managing their sanitation services with varying degrees of effectiveness and equity, and many lessons learnt at neighbourhood level could be shared city-wide and with other cities”, Christine said.
The case of Kota (=the city of) Surakarta illustrates that. Villagers without bank accounts had to go very far away to pay their water and sewerage tariffs. The cost of transportation to make the payment was actually more than the tariff cost itself. Another challenge was that the poorest cannot pay a lump sum to connect to the sewers, but rather pay in small daily, weekly or monthly amounts as part of the tariff. The solution was to put someone collecting the money daily or monthly in the neighbourhood. A community approach served to identify and solve these problems and promote the sewerage connections neighbourhood-wide. This saved the utility substantial travel costs in installing the connections and reduced the connection costs for the households concerned: a win-win situation for both.
The participating cities also used the Community-Based Service approach (CBS) for establishing community-managed simplified sewerage services, communal toilets with baffle reactors and individual septic tank toilets in parts not served by a city-managed sewerage system, or instead of installing the more expensive conventional sewerage network. A drawback was the absence of ecologically more friendly toilet models and safe end disposal. Proper servicing of septic tanks remains a huge challenge when operationalizing safe end disposal of human excreta. Solid waste management and drainage completed the city sanitation strategies.
The local environmental health risk assessments (EHRA studies) helped the cities to classify the neighbourhoods with the worst conditions. The MPA (Methodology for Participatory Assessment) used with the neighbourhoods ranked those where demand and opportunity for improvement were highest. Within these priority locations first improvement actions were planned. At that moment “sanitation champions”, (professionals or political staff interested to bring sanitation forward) played a huge role.
With all this information each city wrote a White Book on existing conditions and problems and a City Sanitation Strategy (SSK in Bahasa) on what would be done where. The strategy included the rationale for Gender- and Poor- inclusive Community Empowerment and its principles, the existing approaches and examples and good practices and failures as well as human and financial resources needed to support neighbourhood improvements. Although the promised central government funding for the fast track action did not come forward several cities put up their own funds to test innovative components of their strategy.
The remarkable success of the joint situation analysis, strategy development and where wanted field trials of pro-poor and gender-equitable community action generated significant demand from other cities. The Government of Indonesia has now planned scaling up to first 80 and later all 330 cities of Indonesia
Scaling up is a challenge due to the variety in cities which a new programme should meet. Aggregating city assessment work and sanitation action plans at the provincial level and by type of city in terms of situations, problems and solutions is planned for the next phase. Once the groups of cities know what they need and want, they can jointly advocate with the central government, development banks and donors for the matched funds to realize these combined city projects.
IRC will use the experiences with the Indonesian city administrations and provincial and central government to go beyond Indonesia and replicate the approach with cities in other countries. A guideline on the community approach in Bahasa has been being prepared jointly with the Indonesian colleagues that can be used as a starting point. There are also special guidelines for gender- and poor-equitable action planning with high risk neighbourhoods, including informed technology choice, and for establishing and managing decentralized simplified sewerage services in an equitable manner.
December 2009
