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rivate companies are not willing to channel their corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for improving public drinking water and sanitation facilities, a seminar heard recently.

Didier Perez from the Air Kita Foundation, which promotes ethics and access to clean water, said the potential was there to vastly improve sanitation and access to drinking water by channeling CSR funds, which are obligatory for companies working in particular fields.

However, he said, private companies often preferred to focus their CSR initiatives on short-term projects such as rebuilding schools or providing helmets for ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers.

During a discussion in Jakarta attended by state officials, clean water activists and scientists, he said that companies generally recognized the importance of public access to sanitation and drinking water. However, he said, most preferred to work directly with local communities rather than involve themselves in activities in which they would have to deal with the government. He said many companies believed state public service programs would require extensive, long-term cooperation with authorities.

“People are very much concerned [about access to clean water], but the problem is how to develop trust, how to encourage them to cooperate with the Indonesian government. I have some examples of people who are interested but they don’t know with whom to work,” Perez said.

He added that CSR departments generally lacked technical expertise required for water and sanitation programs.

The country is falling well short of one of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing by half the proportion of households without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation facilities by 2015.

Nugroho Tri Utomo, the director of drinking water and waste water at the National Development Agency (Bappenas), said it would be difficult to reach the target without major changes.

He said Indonesia needed roughly Rp 110 trillion (US$12.21 billion) to improve its sanitation and drinking water facilities in that time frame, but that it had only allocated around Rp 11 trillion to improve drinking water and Rp 14 trillion to improve sanitation.

The local provincial governments are expected to bear the brunt of the costs.

However, he said, private companies, either through direct investments or CSR projects, could also contribute.