Urun Ide Jatim: Incubation Update
Earlier this year, Pulse Lab Jakarta, JIPPJATIM and the TRANSFORMASI programme launched an innovation competition for public services in Indonesia’s East Java Province. This blog summarizes the three winning ideas and their current stage of prototyping.
Incubation Day
Urun Ide Jatim was held to find innovative ideas for improving public services in Jawa Timur Province. The three winning proposals have already been announced and the teams are currently in the incubation phase, building and testing their prototypes to make them ready for full-scale implementation.
The timeframe for incubation is August to November 2016, during which the teams have access to funds, support networks, and the Lab’s design team. The output of the incubation phase is to have working prototypes, not a final product, which have undergone several development iterations and are ready for further implementation.
To launch the incubation period, TRANSFORMASI and Pulse Lab Jakarta held an Incubation Day in Surabaya in August. During the event, the winners were officially announced and received a symbolic reward for their achievement. The teams also presented their development plan for the incubation phase.
The Incubation Day event was attended by Mr. Dwiyoga P. Soediarso (Secretary of Department for Public Services, Ministry of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform), Ms. Doris Becker (GIZ), Mr. Dodong (Bureau of Organisation, Jawa Timur Provincial Government), and all the winning team members. During the event, both Mr. Dwiyoga and Mr. Dodong showed their support and appreciation for the winners, and stated that we should always look for new ideas to improve public services.
After Incubation Day, the winners had time to develop a workplan, and at the moment they are building and testing their prototypes. Come November, the three teams will share their learning experiences and next steps.
Below is a detailed summary of the winning ideas.
Pemburu Bumil Resti (Ibu Hamil Resiko Tinggi) or “Seekers” of Expectant Mothers with High Risk Pregnancy
The high rate of maternal mortality in Jawa Timur is the target of Team Zero AKI/AKB Kabupaten Banyuwangi, a collection of public servants from the health sector in Kabupaten Banyuwangi, who developed a project entitled Pemburu Bumil Risti. The basic idea is to work with local mobile vegetable vendors, which are well known for their high level of access and social acceptance in communities, even in the most remote areas, to identify expectant mothers with a high-risk pregnancy.
In 2015, there were 567 documented cases of maternal deaths in Jawa Timur, of which 23 occurred in Kabupaten Banyuwangi. Several factors contributing to this are: the lack of data on the whereabouts of expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies, and the fact that midwives are often occupied with administrative tasks which limit their interaction time with expectant mothers. The expectant mothers’ awareness to report their pregnancies to Puskesmas (community health centers) is also low, which in turn leads to late diagnosis of high-risk pregnancies .
The premise of the project is that with proper training, the local super-connecters, namely mobile vegetable vendors, would be able to identify expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies in remote areas. This information could then be shared with midwives or Puskesmas (community health centres) for more targeted maternal health services.
Currently, Team Zero AKI/AKB is working on several prototypes including a smartphone application to allow real-time reporting to Puskesmas, special carts or other signage, and information systems to map the locations of expectant mothers. For piloting purposes, ten mobile vegetable vendors have been recruited. From these first ten ‘seekers’, Team Zero AKI/AKB expects to ascertain the effectiveness of the initiative in the field. Since the mobile application is not yet ready, the seekers are now using a WhatsApp group to report their findings.
Replication and Enhancement of Kakekku Datang
Kakekku Datang (Kartu Keluarga kudata ulang), which means in literal translation “I will update your family card”, is a SINOVIK 2016 award winning programme from Kabupaten Gresik Government. The idea is to simplify the process of updating the Family Card, as well as to persuade people to regularly update their family card.
In order to provide citizens with quality civic administration services, local governments need to have up-to-date demographic data. But in Jawa Timur this is often not the case, given the existence of issues associated with duplicate entries, anomalies, the lack of ubiquity of birth certificates (a prerequisite for the family card), and the fact that deaths are rarely registered.
The Family Card is identified as the entry point to achieve an integrated single identity database due to the completeness of data at the household level. But the family card in Jawa Timur (and Indonesia in general) is not regularly updated, with the last mass update conducted in 2008. People are expected to take the initiative to update their family card if changes occur within their household, an approach which has proven ineffective.
The basic idea of this prototype is that government will assess and collect data directly from households, update the family card if it is no longer valid, and return the updated card to the respective households. Events called “Jemput Bola” are held in Kecamatan level, in which a team from Kabupaten Gresik Government comes to community meeting halls to meet all households in that area. These households bring their Family Card to be assessed, and the team will process the corrections toFamily Cards. This is delivered in parallel with promoting the importance of an updated family card, so that the database stays current. Kabupaten Gresik Local Government is currently developing a dashboard to keep track of the demographic data changes, particularly in viewing the numbers and types of errors of family cards that still need corrections.
The vision is to have more inclusive, integrated and responsive civil administration services in Jawa Timur, with particular goals of improving the validity of the demographic database, increasing awareness of the importance of having an updated family card (or other data sets), and developing the capacity of frontline civic administration services.
Super Agro
Team SuperAgro-ID, a group of social entrepreneurs from Surabaya, proposed a web and smartphone application to better network stakeholders in agriculture or in the agribusiness sector and to remove information asymmetries. Practically, this means developing a large database of weather patterns, climate predictions, fertiliser and seed price data, soil analysis, market demand analysis, and trends of production in other regions.
The project is timely because the Jawa Timur Provincial Government has identified several challenges in the sector, including the ever growing increase of food crop demand, lack of access to capital in terms of finance and technology to increase competitiveness and improper infrastructures in terms of production and distribution. For local farmers the role of middlemen is crucial in marketing their products. The middlemen buy the products from the farmers, paying them directly at the farms/rice fields, and sell the products in the market. The farmers themselves do not have proper knowledge of market prices, as they are not accustomed to marketing their products directly.
SuperAgro aims to provide information that would help farmers identify the best crops to plant and where they should sell their products. The application is also being designed to identify trusted agents/certified middlemen, and to allow farmers to directly contact relevant government officials concerning malpractice or market regulation.
In this incubation period, the SuperAgro team collaborates with Lumajang Regency Local Government and Lumajang farmers to develop the prototypes. During the process, the team identified that farmers are not always aware of the potential benefits of being knowledgeable about crop diversification or market analysis, as their traditional production-distribution pattern relies heavily on middlemen.
Pulse Lab Jakarta is grateful for the generous support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Australia.
