Learning at Scale (Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing Project: Indonesia Country Update June 2009)

The four-year Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing (TSSM) project is now in third year of implementation in India, Indonesia and Tanzania. In East Java, Indonesia, it is demonstrating a combination of innovative approaches at a province-wide scale, in partnership with the national government and local governments of East Java’s 29 districts. The project is operationalizing the Government of Indonesia’s new National Strategy for Community-based Total Sanitation. It is a collaboration between the Government of Indonesia, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Water and Sanitation Program-East Asia and Pacific.
 
Impelmentation experience has been promising, with rapid increases in household sanitation access being reported from most districts, following project interventions. Local governments are co-funding project interventions, progressively internalizing the new methodologies and approaches, and scaling up their application to the whole district. A rich harvest of learning is being gathered about how to combine community-level demand creation with consumer-research-based enhancement of market supplies of improved sanitation products and services. Waht it takes to foster an enabling policy and institutional environment for sustainable sanitation programs is also on the project’s agenda for learning jointly with stakeholders.
 
This field note is an update on TSSM’s progress in Indonesia and an attempt to identify what needs to be done before it concludes, in order taht its learning experiences and knowledge products serve the purpose of scaling up access to improved sanitation in other provinces of Indonesia, as well as help neighboring countries in the region looking for strategies to help them achieve the Millenium Development Goals targets for sanitation.