The cooperation between Indonesia and The Netherlands has been going on for quite a long time with good collaboration between those countries. The cooperation is done under the Memorandum of Understanding and the East Java Province Government (EJP) is one of the primary counterparts of this cooperation.
The Netherlands is supporting the development of an integrated Welang River Basin management strategy, and is one of the real cases of how both countries’ cooperation can improve water, climate, and ecosystem management in EJP. In the initial phase, some activities have been done including the Healthy River Challenge, River Basin Management Academy, and Welang River Basin Flood Management and Master Plan. With the success of the first phase of the initiative, the second phase will be developed from June 2023 to September 2024 to develop Welang River Basin Transformation by Participatory Design which focuses on stakeholder engagement, participatory design, and pilot project implementation.
For the second phase, the Orange Knowledge Program (OKP), a funding that gives access to education and training to professionals and organizations, developed by Netherlands Universities Foundation for International Cooperation (NUFFIC), supported the program. One of the activities at OKP is the Trailor-Made-Training (TMT), a capacity building and training designed to target selected staff of organizations with specific needs and topics.
The TMT also promoted the knowledge exchange with Dutch training providers to conduct the training. In this case, the TMT targets the civil servants in EJP who are a part of Welang River basin management. With The Water Agency as the lead partner, and VU Amsterdam as the main expertise provider, will develop We are Water Education (Indonesia), a project that implements the TMT-OKP by NUFFIC.
The We are Water Education (Indonesia) project aimsto equip EJP civil servants as both regulators and implementors with practical skills and international best practices, enabling knowledge transfer and creating integrated and cross-sectoral collaboration in climate-resilient Water Management for the Welang River Basin. Series of online-based training will be provided on the Asia Water Academy platform with several topics including early warning systems, disaster risk reduction, ecosystem services, and stakeholder engagement, that can skill up the EJP civil servants for the improvement of the Welang River basin.
