Islands development project to provide drinking water, improve hygiene, and deliver training to isolated populations in Kepulauan Seribu, Indonesia

This project, based on a model already successfully implemented in Indonesia at three other locations, aimed to provide drinking and multi-purpose water from rainharvesting to some remote communities dwelling Seribu Islands, a chain of islands to the north of Jakarta’s coast that host underdeveloped, discriminated, and extremely vulnerable villages of fishermen.

Overall goals were providing equitable community access to safe water, improved sanitation and hygiene; strengthening the ability of communities to develop, fund and maintain sustainable water and sanitation systems; supporting programmes to enhance communities’ awareness of the benefits of safe water, sanitation and hygiene.

Some background. These communities badly need water for sanitation purposes and economic development. In fact, they lack basic hygiene, toilets are often common and open air, and both households and schools do not have sufficient water storage capacity. Moreover, they must buy water, especially for drinking purposes, and they don’t benefit from any surplus to use for agricultural pursposes and animals. The fact that the location is remote means there is no infrastructure built by the government yet, and virtually no sources of water other than the sea and rain. Desalination equipment is too expensive and too complex to be sustainably and efficiently used by these smaller communities of fishermen, hence we designed a tailored system that can provide multi-purpose water through rainwater harvesting and filtering. The fishermen, as it always is with the communities we help, were part of the decisional process since the very beginning and are now driving their own development. This is because local knowledge goes a long way, particulatly in Indonesia, and particularly with regard to water issues. The communities have long been aware of their precarious situation, which is dramatically worsening due to population growth, changes in monsoon patterns, domestic inflation and soaring basic commodities price. Our local experts, together with our international experts, tailored the project’s activities around the beneficiaries, with the full support of the central and local authorities.

We also carried out extensive training regarding the operation of the raincatching system in all of its parts, but also and perhaps more importantly on WASH, water resources management, waste management, and household education, detecting and promptly correcting technical, operational, and behavioural mistakes.

Members of neighrourinng communities took part in the project, and readily replicated some of the activities on their islands.

As a further long-term result, project-specific committees were formed and trained. Currently committees from different islands have joined together to form an inter-islands association in order to maxisime results and further coordination.