Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening everybody, depending where you are. My name is Isabel Blackett. I'm the senior sanitation specalist working for the World Bank Water and Sanitation program based in the East Asian regional office in Jakarta. Today I'm going to present an overview of some work I did a few years ago when I first arrived in Indonesia. It was a very exciting, it was a huge and very challenging project in a very complex and diverse country. For me, it was a fantastic experience and the teamwork that resulted in a very good outcome, so something I will always remember. I hope you find it useful and inspiring, and if you ever want to get in contact with me for more information, please do so. But, in the meanwhile, I'll say there's several publications which I'm sure Sandec will let you know about. Thank you. Hello everybody. Today we're going to talk about the Indonesia Sanitation Development Program. This is going to be a case study in which we're going to look at how a national program was started up and has gone to scale. We will do a quick overview of how that happened and the purpose and output of the project, the program design, and the inputs and resources. First of all, if you look at slide 3, this is a cartoon that I think illustrates really how sanitation is perceived in many countries. I've heard the story in Africa and in East Asia, which is mainly where I've worked. No one wants responsibility. Sanitation is a dirty, unpleasant, smelly little child that no one really wants responsibility for. The situation in Indonesia was just the same as that in 2005. But four and a half years later we found the situation had changed quite dramatically. This is a situation where people had begun to accept their responsibility, but it was seen very much in terms of self interest. They would be involved in sanitation because it was good for what their ministry would do, and they would do it together, with no one ministry taking responsibility but everyone playing their part, doing that formally. The question for this session today, and for part 1 and part 2, is why did the decision-makers change their mind and what led them to changing their minds? Let me give a bit of background on the situation of sanitation in Indonesia prior to starting this program. The country is a very large one, 240 million people, and it's almost 50% urbanized. Sanitation has historically, and to this current day, very much seen as a private matter. And, this is something that is the perception of the household but also of local government and national government. It wasn't clear to the government what they're supposed to do. There was no history in which the government was expected to have to undertake public health interventions. This had evolved partly through a rural situation where people looked after their own waste, and then the country had become urbanized, and then that attitude had never really changed. This is illustrated very well by under 2% of the urban areas have actually access to sewer systems, and in global terms, especially for a country that's middle-income or lower-middle income, it's very exceptionally low. In fact, in this stage the only country that has lower sewage access is Laos and their capitol of Vientiane, which has about half a million people has actually got no sewage system at all. Of the perception the country is quite wet, quite high rainfall, and there are lots of rivers, channels and drains, and the perception is that you don't need a system because the waste just goes into these drains, and into these rivers, and it gets washed away. Out of sight, out of mind. But at the same time there is quite high coverage of household toilets. I won't call it sanitation, we'll just say people have access to toilets, typically 80-90% in urban areas. People use very simple pour flush pans connected either to a soakpit or to a drain or a river. The confusing thing about soakpits is they call them "tanky septics", which, certainly aren't septic tanks. And there's still a really quite high, again for a middle-income country, quite high open defecation around 18%, and if you look in the picture, there is actually a toilet, a overhung toilet directly into the river, and the woman there is waiting to use it, and she's queuing because she's certainly not the only one who uses it. Very often you see large queues there. So moving on to slide 6. This program came in, in 2006, the Indonesian Sanitation Sector Development Program, and the purpose of the program was not to build anything at all. It was to establish a sector, a sanitation sector, which had been completely absent. It was seen that this would happen through development and operationalizing policies, through institutional and regulatory reforms, through introduction of sanitation strategic planning, and through a great deal of advocacy and awareness building, and capacity building. The program had four main areas of outputs. First of all, the intention was to establish an enabling environment for sanitation, which really covers a lot of the things mentioned in the previous slide. An environment in which sanitation could be developed at the local level and at the national level. A coordination and investment framework was needed, and next to that you'll see a question mark and the tick. I think the coordination framework has been very successfully established. It started off partly by all the donors getting together and working together and after a couple of years of that, in a sense, the government said, "well, what are you guys up to?" and they joined in and we now have a meeting every one or two months, could be called in by donors or by government on particular subjects, it could be urban, it could be rural, it could be policy, it could be a review that's come out, a particular subject. And that's a good dialogue between all the donors and the government. Works very well. Investment framework perhaps has been a little less successful. The government didn't seem to see the need for an investment framework and they have increased their budgets as you will learn about in part 2, but a strategic investment framework was something that didn't appeal to the way they do the national budgeting. The third item was the sanitation awareness and hygiene campaigns. These would be designed, they would be tested, implemented and they would have a particular focus on the urban poor. Again, this has a question mark and a tick. At one level this has been very successfully achieved. At the other level it was a fairly painful learning process in which we realized you couldn't design these campaigns, and raise awareness, when you had no delivery mechanism and you didn't even know what type of sanitation you were promoting. So the local governments were very reluctant to do any public awareness work, because they hadn't got anything to offer the public and they didn't have answers for many tricky questions. So that became much more an advocacy program, and at that level it was very successful advocacy to get national government and local governments more involved. And, as they became more involved, they had some very specific programs, they became more confident about doing sanitation awareness and hygiene work within communities. And the third component which, I think the fourth component was probably the main hub of this program, was to develop local capacity and citywide sanitation strategies. This is where a lot of the initial focus was built, and we would say that the national change of attitude came from the local governments, not the other way around, and I'll talk a little more about that later. We move on to slide 8. This is a diagram that describes a very comprehensive program design. It was designed strategically to impact at the national level but the actual operational focus of what we were doing on the ground was happening in specific cities. This started with six cities, it seemed to be going very well and we expanded this to twelve cities. And here we modeled what we thought could become a national approach to dealing with sanitation. I will talk more about that in part 2. And then our very specific clients were poor urban dwellers, and so we had some pilots happening at that level but the community focus was in poor urban areas, rather than more generally. And we call this a "<i>poorer inclusive approach"</i>. So what did it take to achieve this? Very broadly, a great deal of time and effort, blood, sweat and tears would be one way of putting it, but we had very strong buy-in from the government of Indonesia, initially from the planning department and the health department and the ministry of works. Public works came on board perhaps a little later. But very strong commitment. They had a budget and they had staffing into this program, so it wasn't a donor-driven program. We contributed, we contracted a multi-disciplinary technical assistance package. It cost around $10 million over four years, but that was done in two sections. First of all we did two years to see how that was going and it was going well, and then it was extended for another four years. So we tested things out and halfway through we made quite a lot of changes. There was a government working group and government staff working alongside the TA hand-in-hand and they worked together in a shared office. This had a lot of benefits. And the TA was sitting near government, not near WSP or the World Bank. At the same time WSP had a number of other activities that it was running in parallel, in very close coordination. These were the ones that you may have heard of: the economics, the sanitation initiative, a big hand-washing program. And finally, the point of flexibility. You cannot design a program like this up front, five years in advance. There has to be a continual reflection: Is this working? Is it not working? and how do we adjust it? So that was the sort of broad framework of what we set out to do and what we used. In part 2, I'm going to talk a bit more about how it actually happened and what was achieved.
