Providing universal access to safe water supply services is one of Indonesia’s development goals as reflected in the National Mid Term Development Plan as well as in the “Indonesia Maju 2045 Vision”. Water utilities play key role in supporting the government in providing the resilience and sustainable services, affordable and inclusive, especially in urban areas. Unfortunately, many water utilities globally, including in Indonesia, are trapped in a vicious cycle of inefficiencies and poor governance, resulting in poor performance and services. Challenges to provide universal access to safe water services are further exacerbated by global forces—including climate change, water scarcity, abrupt changes in the environment (COVID-19), population growth, migrations, and rapid urbanization. Water utilities require a new strategic management approach to provide water supply quality services that ensure continuity of operations, encourage continuous improvement, develop strategic capabilities, and create efficient and sustainable strategic business models.

To guide water utilities to reinvent and strengthen themselves, the World Bank has developed Utility of the Future (UoF), a program designed to catalyze, materialize, and maintain transformation efforts in water utilities. The goal is to become the Utility of the Future — a future-focused utility, which provides reliable, safe, inclusive, transparent, and responsive water services through best-fit practices that allow it to operate in an efficient, resilient, innovative, and sustainable manner. This is achieved through the strengthening of the essential processes of a water utility to face their current challenges, and the development of future-thinking capabilities to be one step ahead in a fast-changing environment. The UoF is a new paradigm for providing water services, far beyond what most utilities have achieved—or even aimed for—today. A UoF provides high-quality services in a highly efficient manner while also being innovative, inclusive, market- and customer-oriented, and resilient.

The UoF program has been implemented in various countries in different regions, including in the East Asia Pacific region. Through the UoF program, the Bank team work closely with the water utilities with the end goal of catalyzing a transformative process that allows utilities to reach a desired performance and maturity level by applying international best practices throughout its value chain. In addition, it challenges utilities to incorporate dimensions that are more relevant today than ever: innovation, inclusion, resilience, and market-orientation. The outputs of the UoF program are a comprehensive utility assessment; a 100-day action plan to jumpstart utility reform, obtain quick wins and tackle the most pressing issues; and a 5-year strategic plan to sustain efforts and address challenges that require a longer timeframe.

Learning from the success of UoF implementation in other countries, as well as considering its perfect alignment with Government of Indonesia’s agenda to improve performance of Indonesia’s water utilities, the Bank is proposing to pilot UoF program in selected Indonesia’s water utility. We believe that the timing of this UoF is right, considering that the government is evaluating the utility’s performance evaluation and benchmarking mechanism and the UoF framework can also strengthen the National Urban Water Supply Framework. The pilot activity will demonstrate how the UoF program is implemented in selected utilities (1 or 2) while at the same time build country’s capacity to be able to scale up the UoF implementation in other utilities. We propose PDAM Tirta Musi Palembang to be the UoF pilot in Indonesia and later on to be included in the Global UoF Club.

To further explain the UoF prior to the implementation of the pilot activities in Indonesia, we would like to invite you to participate in a mini-Webinar and Focus Group Discussion (FGD) of which the Bank’s UoF team in Washington, D.C. will present the UoF framework, followed by discussion to agree on the next steps to start UoF pilot in Indonesia.

The mini-Webinar/Focus Group Discussion (FGD) will be held virtually using Zoom application as per below details:

Day/Date:                        Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Time:                                07:30 – 09:00 AM (Jakarta time)

Meeting Details:              Zoom Meeting Application

                                           Meeting Number: 837 6672 7150

                                           Meeting Password: 2021

Meeting Link: https://bit.ly/WebinaronUtilityoftheFutureFramework

*Simultaneous interpretation will be provided throughout the mini webinar/Focus Group Discussion (FGD).

More information on the UoF can be found in the following website https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/publication/utility-of-the-future.