The past year, Blue Deal Indonesia has worked on various pilots and projects in several areas. Now, in 2025, the Blue Deal partnership in Indonesia looks back at 2024 and at what they accomplished in the various projects.
The past year 2024 drew particular attention to various personnel changes at the DWA-side of the partnership. Even though this takes time for coordination and building trust, the content in the various regions fortunately continued unabated.
The Blue Deal team invested in strengthening relationships, both between the regional partners and with provinces and the national government in Indonesia. Various meetings led to a great deal of enthusiasm and willingness for participation by the higher authorities in future training programmes of the Blue Deal.
Dutch Water Authorities brings to the front that the Blue Deal will continue to be an important cornerstone for the new Dutch international policy. This programme contributes to several key objectives:
Pekalongan: water quality challenges in the production of Batik textile
Pekalongan is famous for its production of Batik textile. However, the Batik industry in Pekalongan is responsible for a large part of the groundwater abstraction and produces wastewater which is discharged mostly untreated to the surface water. The Blue Deal team helps the local government with advice on the treatment of the Batik wastewater.
The NWB (bank of the Dutch water authorities) recently provided a fund to realise a pilot demonstration project for small-scale treatment of Batik wastewater with a nature-based solution (NbS).
In the spring of 2025, the Blue Deal team will design and construct an optimised vertical flow wetland system for treatment of the Batik wastewater, a so-called Mikro IPAL. The community of Batik producers have the ambition to become more sustainable in the Batik production to achieve the Green Batik label.
The Blue Deal team will monitor the Mikro IPAL for one year and will train the Batik producers and local government for the operation and maintenance. When successful, there is a possibility for wider implementation.
Tangerang: flood protection
As part of flood protection in the Puri Tigaraksa area, Kabupaten Tangerang is creating a larger retention basin, a so-called tandon. In the densely populated area it will be a challenge to maintain the tandon in the future. With the help of Blue Deal we want to create awareness and a sense of shared responsibility to keep the tandon and the surrounding area safe and clean by involving the local community. For this, the idea is to create a recreational area around the tandon, to let the local community enjoy the public area. We organised a workshop to start developing this awareness and connection with the community. In preparation for this workshop, we worked together with stakeholders, such as community leaders and villagers.
The next steps will be to embed community participation in the upcoming milestones regarding the layout design and development of the tandon. The given input will be processed and, together with the Kabupaten Tangerang, we will plan more community meetings or workshops to increase engagement and awareness around waste- and water management in Puri Tigaraksa.
Semarang: water beyond boundaries
The Blue Deal Semarang team has been working on drawing attention to better cooperation between the operational departments in order to tackle major challenges regarding the drainage of water.
During our work visits, we realised it was not enough to solely focus on the various pumping stations. It was necessary to have more interaction and familiarity with colleagues from other operational departments. In various working sessions, the DPU employees discussed their challenges related to the drainage of water. Both in the session with policymakers and in the session with operational employees, we asked how you could help other departments with their challenges. This resulted in many applicable and creative solutions, which shows that water is a subject that transcends departments.
Based on the same philosophy, we noticed that the various Blue Deal Indonesia projects are also increasingly contacting each other to exchange information. The local Semarang team is increasingly receiving questions about activities and actions carried out in other affiliated projects.
