Dutch – Indonesian water sector event: looking back at positive results from bilateral collaborations

With passion and enthusiasm, the results of bilateral collaborations between Indonesia and the Netherlands where shared with 52 participants from the Dutch and Indonesian water sector on Wednesday 14 December. Partners for Water, EcoShape, Invest International and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Jakarta elaborated about successful projects of 2022 and gave a sneak preview of what is to come in 2023. One thing was clear, all the parties are looking forward to increasing their impact in Indonesia.

Nature Based Solutions in Sidoarjo

The Indonesian government has requested support from the Government of the Netherlands for the improvement of the regional aquaculture sector in Sidoarjo in East Java, whilst strengthening coastal sediment management and the conservation of the mangrove system. The Partners for Water programme has assigned a scoping project to Ecoshape, and in the beginning of December, a team of experts in Building with Nature visited Sidoarjo.

The past 7 years, EcoShape has been actively working on restoring the eroding mangrove coast in Demak with Nature Based Solutions. This has been co-funded by Fund Sustainable Water (RVO). Now EcoShape can translate the lessons learned in Demak to Sidoarjo and potentially integrate solutions to improve the aquaculture and environmental issues in the region. One of the aims of the scoping assignment is to share the knowledge and results with the Dutch and international water sector. A dissemination webinar will be planned in Q1 of 2023.

Asia Water

Robin van Boxtel, First Secretary at the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta, elaborated about the trade mission ‘ASIAWATER 2022’ in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which was organised by the Dutch Embassies of the ASEAN countries, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP). The Dutch Embassy presented the current water cooperation between the Netherlands and Indonesia and 10 Dutch companies from the water sector where part of the expo. Van Boxtel ended with the announcement of more events to be held in the coming years and the representation of the ASEAN countries at Aquatech Amsterdam in 2023.

Semarang Urban Flood Resilience

Jeroen Bakker from Invest International talked about the Semarang Urban Flood Resilience project. To support the City of Semarang in becoming more flood resilience, Invest International has provided 1 million Euro coming from the Develop2Build Dutch Government to Government grant. This money will be used to conduct studies and design and select infrastructure measures to improve Semarang’s climate resilience by reducing the incidence and frequency of floods. Once the research is conducted and the interventions are selected, the project will be handed over to Indonesian project owners who will finance and procure the interventions. The kick-off of this exciting project will be in January 2023!

Finally, Partners for Water gave a warm goodbye to Rien Dam, who has been the Delegated Representative Water in Jakarta and an appreciated contributor to the bilateral collaborations between the Indonesian and Dutch water sector.

The different water parties are looking forward to continuing sharing their knowledge and expertise in the coming year. As Rien Dam said: “The Indonesian – Dutch relationship of the water sector has been long and will be continued for a long time. “