Assesment of community capacity on communal wastewater treatment in Yogyakarta

The sanitation has become a major issue in Yogyakarta because of high contamination of well water by domestic wastewater. The Government of Yogyakarta City has built Communal WWTP using the DEWATS to treat domestic wastewater. In the implementation, most of the Communal WWTP are not utilized properly even though the Government of Yogyakarta City has conducted community capacity building. The purposes of this study are to analyze the condition of Communal WWTP currently in the study area, to determine to what extent the improvements of community capacity of Communal WWTP from community capacity building process for self-management of Communal WWTP, to identify barrier in community capacity building, to develop an indicator framework that contributed to community capacity and to come up with strategies for improvement of community capacity to support Communal WWTP sustainability. Study areas of this research are Pandeyan and Pakuncen village as Communal WWTP sample built by Environment Agency in 2005, as well as the village of Prawirodirjan and Rejowinangun included in the Regional Settlement and Infrastructure Agency program of Communal WWTP in 2010. This research uses qualitative method with case study and participatory approach and descriptive analysis to describe existing condition of Communal WWTP in study area. Laverack (2002) method is used to assess community capacity improvement from Communal WWTP program. Methods of data collection are reviewing documents, semi-structured interview and observation. The results shows that in general Communal WWTP in the study area is able to treat domestic wastewater. In the assessment of community capacity, both of Rejowinangun and Pandeyan village ,capacity improvement occur in every domain of community capacity. While, in the village of Pakuncen and Prawirodirjan, the capacity still needs to be improved due to the lack of monitoring and outreaching. The indicators which affect the process of community capacity building are economy issue, internal agent, women empowerment, role of government and follow up. Some strategies could be proposed for community capacity building improvement namely, identifying existing community capacities with capacity assessment, determine short term and long term objective, local facilitator recruitment, linkages establishment between stakeholder, developing information systems, perform support and the monitoring of community capacity change