What we do

A hygiene education session in a village in Rangamati District, Chittagong Hill Tracts

Credit: WaterAid / Juthika Howlader

WaterAid Bangladesh and its partners have, over the past few years, developed an 'integrated, participatory, empowering' approach to improve safe water supply, environmental sanitation and hygiene promotion.

• How we work
• Access to safe water and effective sanitation for poor
• Total sanitation
• Hygiene promotion

How we work

WaterAid works in partnership with local NGOs in both rural and urban areas to develop its partners' capacity to implement programmes.

This fresh, empowering approach makes the new facilities a lot more sustainable as the communities recognise the importance of good hygiene - so they play an active role in establishing the facilities, maintaining them in the long run and keeping up good hygiene practices.

We work in technically and socially 'hard to serve' districts. The programme strategy is guided by the following principles:

• A participatory and community-based process
• Led by the community, facilitated by partner organisations: information dissemination and analytical skill development so that poor people can visualise their problems
• Managed by local community people: building their confidence through recognition of indigenous knowledge and technology and mobilise local resources
• Focus first on hygiene behaviour change and second on infrastructure: demand-driven with meaningful participation of all groups of people, with special focus on women and the most vulnerable or the poorest
• Compatible with the existing programme context

Three key features characterise the programme: integration, participation, and empowerment of communities, households and individuals. The programme approach leads to hygiene promotion activities. These are used to catalyse a community 'demand' from an informed knowledge base.

Access to safe water and effective sanitation for poor

In rural areas, WaterAid concentrates its work in under-served and difficult geographical locations such as hilly, low water table areas (mainly the Barind area in the north-west), flood-prone river islands (char areas), and in areas where alternative technologies such as deep tubewells, spring protection, and rainwater catchments are needed.

In coastal belts, where saline intrusion render shallow tubewell water non-potable, Pond Sand Filter technology has been introduced to ensure safe drinking water.

Projects are undertaken to help poor communities, particularly vulnerable, female-headed families, and disabled people. WaterAid has also targeted areas inhabited by ethnic minorities who have traditionally been neglected in the provision of basic services, particularly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region.

Projects in urban areas aim to provide water supply and sanitation facilities to the poor people living in the slums of Dhaka, Chittagong, Khulna and Narayanganj. They include extending WASA's piped water supply, installation of tubewells, and construction of cluster latrines/community sanitation blocks, along with menstrual hygiene management facilities.

For WaterAid, implementation of water and sanitation projects in urban slums has been a major breakthrough. It convinced the water supply authorities to permit connections to informal settlements in different urban locations after giving guarantee of payment from the partnering NGOs.

WaterAid has been implementing these projects under the Advancing Sustainable Environmental Health (ASEH) project funded by WaterAid and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID).

Total sanitation

Recently, the government has declared a number of Upazilas and Unions '100% sanitised' taking into account mainly household latrine coverage. WaterAid has been working to develop a joint mechanism for implementation of Water and sanitation activities and is piloting the concept in an area which the government has already declared as 100% sanitized.

In addition, WaterAid is also piloting research activities such as Citizens' Actions, and Community-led Water and Sanitation Budget Performance Monitoring and Formulation, with a view to ensuring poor people's participation in decision-making processes. 

Hygiene promotion

WaterAid and its partner organisations run awareness campaigns and influencing activities about the importance of good hygiene. This is done with the understanding that once communities learn the link between poor hygiene and disease, they feel inspired to improve their hygiene practices leading to their willingness to establish water and sanitation facilities themselves.

The hygiene promotion approach includes stopping open defecation, disposing off faeces safely, maintaining key hygiene practices by people in rural and urban areas. WaterAid offers an integrated package of safe water supply, sanitation and hygiene promotion interventions for the poor.