World Bank calls gives thumbs up to Indonesia's KIP
By T. Sima Gunawan
ISTANBUL, Turkey (JP): The World Bank hailed yesterday the Kampong Improvement Program (KIP) as an "urban success story."
"The KIP is probably the most successful and widely known program of this kind," the World Bank's Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development, Ismail Serageldin, said in a statement released in conjunction with the UN Conference on Human Settlements II. The Conference is also known as Habitat II.
The urban renewal program began in Jakarta and Surabaya and was then institutionalized and replicated across the country with the support of the World Bank.
In Jakarta, it is called the MHT (Muhamad Husni Thamrin) program, after the renowned Jakarta independence hero. Jakarta started the program in 1969 to upgrade kampungs, the urban residential areas which are generally poorly serviced and occupied predominantly by poorer people. The city administration, realizing that it could not provide resources to rebuild the kampongs, decided to concentrate its resources on improving those elements of physical infrastructure that people found difficult to organize and construct themselves.
The KIP is one of 600 programs submitted by more than 100 countries to the Habitat II's Best Practices Awards. Best Practices are initiatives of governments, local authorities, or grassroots organizations which are effective in solving problems.
Even though the KIP did not win a prize, it was recognized by the World Bank as useful.
According to the World Bank, the KIP has now reached nearly 15 million people across the country at a cost of between US$23 and $118 per person.
"The benefits were improved health and productivity of the kampong population. Residents used their own resources to improve their housing and property," the Serageldin said.
He said the worst slums in the world can be turned into livable communities with the combination of community involvement, the right government policies and an investment of about $100 per person.
"Community involvement in both the planning and maintenance of urban projects is the key to their success," he said. "That is the best way to ensure that the poor have a voice in their own future."
Urban areas globally are expected to double to between four and five billion people by 2025, some 80 percent of them in developing countries.
The UN predicts that Jakarta's population will reach 21.2 million in 2015, while the Jakarta administration optimistically puts the number at 15.2 million. Today, there are more than 9 million people living in the city.
The government estimates that there will be 15 new urban areas with populations of more than one million, four of which will have a population of more than five million each. Around 50 and 60 percent of the Indonesian population will live in urban areas,
According to the World Bank, some 220 million poor people have no access to safe drinking water in developing world cities, and an estimated 420 million have no basic sanitation services. Today's backlog, plus future demand, would raise the total of urban population without basic services to 1.4 billion by 2010.
"The rapid growth in developing world cities is making living intolerable for the urban poor and threatening the economic, social and economic progress of these cities," he said.
The World bank's total lending for urban-oriented projects totals some $25 billion in more than 5,000 cities and towns. The Bank plans to lend an additional $15 billion over the next five years, an increasing part of it directed towards programs that involve community-based organizations (CBOs) and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs).