Rumoh Impian Loen,
A Comic for Community Monitoring

To build 100.000 new houses is no easy feat. Quality needs to be continuously improved. Keeping up with  safety and anti-seismic standards is a concern.

The Public Works Department and BRR produced a Building Code (go to link
Building Code page).
UN-Habitat supports external  3rd party monitoring, together with the Engineering Department of the Syiah Kuala University.
UN-Habitat also signed an agreement this week with the Public Works Department (NAD) for co-operation on the evaluation of monitoring results in relation to construction quality. And the Shelter Work Group's discussion of May 1, on construction quality issues arising from field monitoring,  was very well attended and productive.

A new initiative to improve monitoring is about to come from the printing press :
a cartoon for lay people. The intention is to involve beneficiaries and beneficiary communities in monitoring and evaluation. The cartoon has been developed by ArCli (Architecture Clinic), a joint initiative of GTZ, PU-NAD, IAI and Holchim. “Rumoh Impian Loen” or literally translated as
“My Dream House ” is being printed
at 30.000 copies and will be distributed within tsunami affected areas in Aceh.
UN-Habitat and UNDP are sharing printing costs with ArCli and are taking
the lead in the distribution.

The comic explains how to construct a decent and proper house (from site planning to housing design and to implementation, based on applicable technical guidance as described in the Building Code and the Indonesian National Standard (SNI)). The comic cares about environmentally-friendly building practices and the local production of building materials. The 100-page pocket book is written as a simple story of an ordinary Acehnese beneficiary family getting itself through the various decisions and pitfalls when building a house.

As always, the biggest challenge is distribution and socialization.
What is already in preparation ?

Targeted Distribution of Comics

( Comics are distributed in function of the anticipated outstanding need in each district, with a target of one comic per two beneficiary families.)

Other Issues

Milestone Reporting : What's the Progress ? 24,000 Houses Finished ?

Since last year, BRR and UN-Habitat has been monitoring housing progress through updates from organizations. It remains a difficult task. What do we actually know ?

1. 11,000 houses were finished by December 2005
   
2. 18,000 houses were finished by February 2006
   
3. We estimate that 24,000 houses were finished by the end of last week (April 2006)
   
4. We have a good estimate that 20,000 units are under construction.
   
5. We forecast that 35,000 houses will be finished by end of June.
   
6. Out of 118 organizations tracked, 57 are working actively. 18 have finished, while 15 have little progress. For 28 we cannot record activity.
   
7. We have updated reporting on 128,000 commitments (since the start of reconstruction); this figure does not include units to be built by BRR on its own 2006 APBN budget, but it does include the organisations with little progress (30,000 units committed) and the organisations with no progress (13,000 units committed).

BRR reported that 41,000 units are now completed. Closer to the mark would be a statement “completed or under construction”. The issue is not that organizations are not starting new housing, but that they are slowly finishing the started houses. Supply lines for materials, labour and contract management skills are evidently stretched, but the advent of the dry season will probably help. (Our sample monitoring in co-operation with Unsyiah shows that early this year, more units were indeed started than finished, except for Aceh Besar. They survey was done in locations where construction was ahead and progressing towards finishing and handover; so even here new units were often still started.)

What are the critical issues in relation to reporting progress in a credible way ?

First, UN-Habitat tries to telephone or email as many as possible organizations, but it also compiles RAN reporting data and district-level reporting data. It remains a fact, however, that reporting drawn from RAN remains difficult and incomplete – but the same is true for direct queries. The best method remains the combination of many sources of data.

Secondly, we do no longer rely on trend extrapolations, as the reported completions for mid 2006 are not tenable. Organizations are too often reporting the progress “as planned” and not “as is”, especially for targets such as 'half-year'. This was also the case for the December 2005 reporting. We now simply look at the quality of data itself : well-reporting organizations, organizations with weak reporting and organizations with clearly or likely no progress. Based on this “behaviour”, we make a judgment on likely progress.

Download Milestone Report ML03May06 (PDF, 24 KB)

Government

Aceh Province

Canada Helps to Provide Timber Frame

The Canada British Columbia provincial government will start providing assistance in providing timber frames for housing construction in Aceh province, Indonesia. The assistance is given through Forestry Innovation Investment Ltd to Aceh-Nias Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency (BRR). The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed in Banda Aceh on April 26th, 2006 by Head of BRR, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto and Senior Advisor Trading Canadian Embassy, Nicolas Lepage.

More information (in Bahasa)..... (PDF, 150KB)

Spotlight: Yayasan “Mamamia”

Long before the tsunami, Mamamia had already a close working relationship with the villages of Kemukiman Cot Jeumpa in Kecamatan Lhoong, Greater Aceh. Logically, Mamamia contacted the people in Lhoong as soon as possible after the tsunami, observed their desolate personal condition and the total destruction of their villages, listened to them and promised to respond immediately to their greatest hope and wish: the rebuilding of their houses within the shortest possible time. As for the eligible beneficiaries, the initial 800 houses were closely linked to such tsunami victims who had a house before the tsunami in 10 villages in Lhoong Sub-district . Later, 185 houses were added to attend to the needs of the poorer section of the village populations who had no house before the tsunami, including ex-GAM members who have re-integrated their villages of origin.

More information on Yayasan Mamamia (PDF, 32 KB)

UN-HABITAT

.....More Canada

The World Urban Forum was established by the United Nations to examine one of the most pressing issues facing the world today: rapid urbanisation and its impact on communities, cities, economies and policies. The World Urban Forum is a biennial gathering that is attended by a wide range of partners, from non-governmental organisations, community-based organisations, urban professionals, academics, to governments, local authorities and national and international associations of local governments. It gives all these actors a common platform to discuss urban issues in formal and informal ways and come up with action-oriented proposals to create sustainable cities.

The third session of the World Urban Forum (WUFIII) will be hosted by the Government of Canada. It will take place in Vancouver, Canada, from 19 to 23 June 2006 and have as its main theme, Our Future: Sustainable Cities – Turning Ideas into Action.

Vancouver also hosted the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in 1976.  This led to the founding of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, which became UN-Habitat in 2002.

More information.......

UN-Habitat Project Office
Jl. T.M Pahlawan No. 3A Banda Aceh  NAD, Indonesia
Telp: +62 651 741 2525 / Fax: +62 651 25258
http://unhabitat-indonesia.org

UN-HABITAT - Fukuoka, Japan
http://www.fukuoka.unhabitat.org

Housing & Settlements Information@UNIMS
Visit the housing page at the UNIMS website for contact addresses and archives of policy documents, data, meeting notes, reports and other sector informations.


Housing & Library@UN-Habitat Banda Aceh
UN-Habitat (Banda Aceh) collects documents on housing reconstruction.
Visit our catalogue.If you can contribute your documents,
please contact Yayan at yayan@unhabitat-indonesia.org

For subscribe, please send email to :
diella@unhabitat-indonesia.org