Pengelolaan air di kalangan penduduk miskin di Kota Semarang: Pembelajaran dari tingkat lokal

Abstract

Fulfillment of water services for urban poor is still an issue among academicians and practicioners. Eventhough the Law has stated that access to clean water is the rights of each citizens, there are still numbers of poor people that have no access to clean water. For the urban poor, access to clean water have to be traded off with expensive price. It leads to the household water expenses, reach to more than half of total household expenses. Nowadays, water services from government provider (PDAM) have not reach all possible customers. Limited infrastructure and water sources give impacts to limited services from PDAM. This situation also apply for Semarang City case, PDAM Tirta Moedal can only reach about fifty percent of people's demand. For solving the problems, there are some initiatives coming from local people for fulfilling water needs collectively such as in Sukorejo and Tugurejo. These two local level water fulfillment systems, showed how the flexibility of local people can help in fulfilling the need of citizen to clean water. This article describes the process of local people developing these initiatives, the mechanism of water fulfillment in each system, impact of the water management in the local level to its accessibility and its sustainability. These initiatives can be used as lesson learned for other areas.