JP/Ipunk
Poor communication has hindered Indonesia’s cooperation with the United Nations (UN) toward achieving their Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
“Your country’s statistics show that around 68 percent of citizens have access to proper sanitation, but our figures show only 52 percent,” United Nations’ Children’s Fund (Unicef) Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, Francois Brikke, told a workshop Thursday.
“We still believe that Indonesia will be able to reach its MDG targets. But that requires a lot of work.”
The MDG consist of eight international development goals that nearly 200 UN member states and at least 23 international organizations agreed to achieve by the year 2015.
They include halving extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and establishing a global partnership for development.
Indonesia committed to providing water access to at least 50 percent of its citizens and sanitation to at least 60 percent when it signed the MDG agreement in New York in 2000.
“We can only provide around 18 percent of clean water access now, and it is mostly in western Indonesia,” the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) Director for Settlements and Housing, Budi Hidayat, said.
A lack of communication and government unfamiliarity with the program are the major factors for the differing statistics recorded by the country and the UN, according to the Health Ministry’s Environmental Health Director, Wan Alkadri.
“We also use different approaches, definitions, calculations and methods in assessing water access and sanitation figures. For example, we include only pipe systems in our water access assessment but the Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) considers water towers as well,”
he said.
“Therefore, we are going to intensify our communication with each other via email and stage periodic workshops, like the one we are having today, for all concerned institutions.”
The workshops aim to re-introduce the JMP, a nearly two-decade old cooperation program on water access and sanitation which is basically unknown to several government institutions.
“The JMP is an official mechanism of the UN to monitor the progress toward the drinking water and sanitation targets of the MDG,” the World Health Organization (WHO) Water Sanitation and Health Regional Advisor Payden told The Jakarta Post.
Because the JMP had based its MDG monitoring only on national representative surveys and censuses from 2000, JMP estimates are often different from those of various government institutions.
According to Payden, institutions, such as the Health Ministry are responsible for preparing sectors to manage JMP monitoring. (hdt)
