Feature Stories of AusAID

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Karangsari, Where Community Successfully Manage Their Own Sanitation

In celebration of the UN International Water Day on 22 March 2003, AusAID organised a tour for media to visit some relevant water supply and sanitation sites. One of AusAID's water and sanitation projects visited was the Community-Based Shallow Sewer of Rural Setting project in Desa Karangsari, Garut, West Java. The following is a brief story on Desa Karangsari.

People in Desa Karangsari are now happier than ever. You can see that from their joyful faces, as they now have much better access for sanitation.

Ever since the eruption of the Galunggung Mountain a couple of decades ago, the community in the area has been depressed. They desperately required clean water. Sanitation had also been miserable. Located on the foot of the Galunggung Mountain, near Garut, West Java (only two and half hour driving from the province capital, Bandung) the community was not so different from communities in remote areas; it has facing inadequate and unsafe water supply, and a lack of sanitation services which impacted significantly on their health and quality of life.

Here, as in many other places in urban areas, water sources are located quite a distance from people's houses. While most men are occupied with working outside their houses, it is the women and children who have to walk a number of kilometres to fetch a little water. How much can you take when you have to walk while both hands have to carry small containers?

Due to poor water quality, lack of community awareness in health, and limitations in the community's ability to fund water and sanitation infrastructure development, there were quite a lot of water borne diseases in the area such as diarrhoea, typhoid, and cholera.

In around 1999 Yayasan Setia Budi Utama (YASBU) from Bandung, capital of West Java province, met people from the village. YASBU then initiated an effort to help improve water services and the health status of the targeted community in the area through the provision of clean water supply and sanitation facilities and involving community in each development process. “The Yayasan submitted the proposal to AusAID who agreed to fund this project the sum of Rp. 434, 513, 500,” said YASBU's director, Aris Mawardi.

The project aimed to improve the health status of the targeted community through the provision of “a community-based shallow sewer system” and use it to demonstrate a sanitation alternative within the village, kabupaten and other areas. The community designed and constructed three shallow sewer systems to cater for 380 families. AusAID supported YASBU to conduct relevant training for the Desa Karangsari community to manage shallow sewer systems.

Step by step the community have started to use the shallow sewer systems they have built. Step by step, their health status has also improved. “There is now less diarrhoea than before,” said a midwife from the area who also used the facility. Step by step, slowly but surely, the community is also becoming more organised: the Community Sanitation Development Committee (which was facilitated by YASBU) has now been replaced by the Community Sewerage Maintenance Board which is responsible for the operation and maintenance of this sewer system over the long term.

This was another success for AusAID which has been providing assistance in the rural water supply and sanitation sector in Indonesia for almost 30 years. Completed projects have facilitated over one million people to gain access to water supply and sanitation facilities.

This page was last updated on 12 July 2006

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