An exceptionally strong message can be captured in human quality development efforts that are more popular as MDGs (Millennium Development Goals), namely the importance of capability improvement of an individual person or group of people both men and women in order to achieve more quality and dignity life. The improvement of such human quality is carried out in an effort to improve services in health, education and clean water and sanitation, which must be placed in priority for low-income people capability.

In that context, the ironical issue of access to clean water constitutes ‘cost of water, ’just when the poor must pay 5 times of the rich. The main issue – particularly for the urban people – is the lack of connection and access (both to PDAM or other alternative of piped water system). Generally, that issue involves insufficient investment, limited availability of raw water, bad management (corrupted behavior) and some number of other socio-political issues. The question is what can be done when seeing such limited access by the low-income people to clean and healthy water. The accusation and critic of the limited coverage and quality of PDAM service coupled with the fact that many of low-income people live in illegal settlement (which is difficult to facilitate by PDAM).

The weakness of policy and social protection, leads the low-income people to face the ‘vendors’ who supply the basic needs at expensive cost. Such high cost is not proportionate with the minimum water quality and quantity (and also sanitation) of the beneficiaries of the ‘water mafia’. Meanwhile, they are still susceptible and far from the clean and healthy behavior. In addition to that, a not less controversial issue is the “Socialize tariff”, including capacity improvement of various PDAM. The future challenge, as disclosed in the Formative Research ESP (2006), would be that the consumers would question more ‘why do we have to pay, if the service was so bad’ (they tend not to question the cost that they have to pay, when the service provided is satisfactory). In other words, the basic issue that is often found has been: how is the proper correlation between ‘reasonable tariff’ versus ‘reasonable services’.

In Indonesia, based on the data from the Department of Health of the Republic of Indonesia, in every birth of 1,000 babies, 50 die, with one of the main causes has been diarrhea. This is often caused by source of water that has been polluted with human excrement. In global context, every year about 1.6 million children in the world die because of diarrhea, equal to a child every second (UNICEF).

USAID / ESP hopes to extend its advocacy partnership and support intensively for better access to water and sanitation to prevent diarrhea prevalent on children under five years old. In this support, USAID/ESP together with TEMPO Media Group intends to invite the media/journalist to discuss the controversial issue around the issue of water for the low-income people. With this, it is expected that the emphasizing of the message on this issue can still be maintained in the midst of the current social economic problem complexities of the people by setting forth some of the best practices as contribution effort to solve this problem.