Sanitation Updates

The government is launching a campaign to protect and secure natural resources, such as water, saying climate change is seriously affecting Indonesians’ health and is a burden on the national health system.

Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari, speaking during a World Health Day event here Sunday, said, “Climate change is directly and indirectly profoundly affecting people’s health. There are more disease outbreaks and other problems due to the imbalance of the ecosystem.” Siti said the changing climate would cause natural disasters, such as heat waves, floods and drought. Changing temperatures and precipitation might also increase outbreaks of diseases sensitive to the climate, such as malaria, dengue, malnutrition and diarrhea, she said.

“That’s why efforts to improve basic sanitation facilities are needed in dealing with immediate and future health consequences.”  (…)

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

 BALI, Indonesia, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) — Four countries in Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have suffered 9 billion U.S. dollars economic loss annually due to poor implementation of sanitation, about 2 percent of their combined GDP, a recent study conducted by the World Bank has said.

The study said that Indonesia, the biggest Southeast Asia economy, had suffered the most losses of 6.3 billion U.S. dollar per year.

Indonesia has struggled to save its state budget from the impact of the global economic slowdown, soaring oil price and commodities, as well as high inflation pressure. The government has planned to widen the budget deficit from 1.7 percent of the GDP or 73.3 trillion rupiah (about 7.97 billion U.S. dollars) to 2percent of the GDP or 83.7 trillion rupiah (some 9.1 billion U.S. dollars).

Read More -  China View

BALI, Indonesia, Feb. 26 — Over 200,000 children died in East Asia per year and a half of them were in Indonesia, due to water-borne diseases such as diarrhea, the World Bank said here Tuesday.

Almud Weitz, regional team Leader of WB’s Water and Sanitation Program in East Asia and the Pacific, said that the diseases were caused by poor sanitation.

“The number of children die per year is about 200,000 in east Asia. That is a lot. Over 100,000 of them are in Indonesia,” she said at a Media Workshop here.

The leader said that the fatality related with the lack of access to sanitation, which affects 800 million to one billion people in the region.

The countries which signed the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have agreed to halve the number of people who do not get access to sanitation by 2015, according to Weitz.

However, Weitz said that basically the sanitation statistic in East Asia including Indonesia, was not so bad to start for improvement, compared with other region.

The United Nations has declared that this year is as the year of sanitation. Indonesia is one the four most populated countries in the world, with over 240 million population.

Source - Xinhua

The lack of clean public facilities in the country attests to the apathy most people feel regarding the issue of toilet cleanliness, according to a concerned group.

“Most Indonesians still look down on toilets although they use them at least five times a day,” said Naning Adisowo, chairwoman of the Indonesian Toilet Association.

“Sorry to say, most toilets in state buildings are badly designed, forcing the user to spray a lot of water,” she said.

She estimated that on average, an Indonesian uses 21 liters of water in the toilet per day.

Read More - The Jakarta Post

Jan 9, 2008

Homes in Aceh, Indonesia, destroyed in the tsunami in December 2004 have been replaced by better houses with proper sanitation. Much more progress like this is needed in this International Year of Sanitation.

In 2004, 42 per cent of the world’s population – 2.6 billion people – were without improved sanitation facilities. Lack of sanitation, along with poor hygiene and unsafe drinking water, contributes to the deaths, from diarrhoeal diseases, of more than 1.5 million children each year.

Link to the People and Planet article

Jan 8, 2008

The poor sanitation situation caught the attention of the Environmental Services Program (ESP), a USAID project working on the development of community-based sanitation facilities in poor areas.

Together with the Malang Regency government, the ESP made funds available for a cost-sharing project to build a proper sanitation system that could be used by the whole community. The overall fund reached Rp 475 million (US$52,000), with Rp 200 million provided by the local government.

Link to the Cempaka Projects blog entry