Life on the edge
John Vidal, The Guardian's Environment Editor, reports on his visit to Dhaka's slums in Bangladesh with WaterAid.
There are slums and slums. I've seen them in Africa, South America, Indonesia and China but those of Dhaka in Bangladesh are something else. If WaterAid were ever to publish a good (or bad) slum prize, then Dhaka's would probably win first, second and third places in the hygiene, overcrowding, level of human misery, desperation and squalor categories.
More than two million invisible people live in Dhaka's slums, keeping their human dignity in the most awful circumstances. Only a few settlements are officially recognised and the people are invisible because they have no voice with government and are all but ignored by official aid.
Most of the slums are technically illegal and the city authorities, however much they would like to, are not obliged to do anything for them. So they fend for themselves.
Some are huge areas, others hug backstreets. A few are 20 or more years old and have electricity and limited services. Others are being built even as you read this. How can anyone deliberately build a new slum?
Anything is possible in Dhaka. Because the city lies on very low ground and has next to no sanitation, much of the rubbish, chemical and human waste ends up being carted to the outskirts of the ever growing city and is dumped on ground that regularly floods. But so scarce is building land that even these stinking cesspits are valuable and entrepreneurs take them over to build streets on stilts which they then let out to the poorest people. The city is literally being built on its own excrement.
We went to many slums in Dhaka, but the one called Outfall was remarkable - street after narrow street of thousands of people living mostly on less than $1 a day, six or more to a room, with just the minimum of possessions, without water, electricity or sanitation.
There we met 10 young women all of whom were trying to make people aware of the importance of sanitation and cleanliness. One of the WaterAid group asked how many of them knew of someone whose child had died because of unsanitary conditions and easily-avoided waterborne diseases.
Honufa put her hand up first, then Taslima, then Rakhi. But they didn't just have second hand experience. Each of them had lost at least one child of their own.
That was three women in 10. Multiply them across all of Dhaka's slum dwellers and then over the millions of young women who lose their babies each year in Accra, Jakarta, Nairobi, Lima, and 1,000 other world cities which have exploded in the past 20 years and have no sanitation, and you begin to sense the human heartbreak behind those UN statistics that tell us, coldly, that 2.4 billion people live without sanitation or that half that number have no water.
So why is this scandal allowed to go on? The money is there and so is the will to improve the slums. The problem is that the people who live in the slums don't have the money and those who do have it don't necessarily have the will.
Sanitation has barely been on the agenda of the big donor governments who mostly concentrate on rural areas and many projects never get started because few governments will work with people who are technically illegal.
Meanwhile, the head of the city water company, a brave, stretched man, is deeply troubled. He has pioneered a change in government attitudes to slums and now has a detailed plan to bring water and sanitation to the whole city. But it would cost $500million.
And still World leaders wring their hands and do next to nothing, struggling to reach agreements or funding for water and sanitation. At the rate they work it will take more than 100 years before everyone in Outfall gets water. By then millions more children will have died needlessly.
Yet much of the work is simple enough. We found one tubewell in a terrible condition in Outfall. All around it was rubbish, flies, mosquitoes and junk.
It was a standing disaster area, yet 250 or more people depended on it. All it needed was for the rubbish to be cleaned up and the well to be raised on a concrete plinth above the mud. How much would it cost? We asked WaterAid's partner organisation. Just £60. We gave the money and within two weeks the work had been done.
So how do you multiply that 1,000 times in Dhaka and one million times across the world? WaterAid is on the right track. By working with respected local partners who know the situation in every area, and by taking the initiative, they are making a real impact.
So far, they have brought water and sanitation to more than 50,000 in Dhaka alone. It's nitty gritty work that needs careful preparation, long consultation and negotiation with the communities, the city authorities, donors and others. But the difference it can make is the difference between life and death.
Thirty-year-old Hasina is the caretaker for the sanitation block in her slum area, built with help from WaterAid. "My understanding of cleanliness has totally changed since getting the new sanitation block in my slum," she says. "I know so much more now. As caretaker for the block I earn 600 taka per month (about£7) which is paid for by the community. Before this I was unemployed.
Before I would be lucky to get a wash once every three days. I had to travel to the market far away and buy expensive water which I would have to carry home. I would also wait for the rain and stand in the rain for a wash. Now I bathe every day and feel so much more clean and comfortable.
About 100 families use this sanitation block which is split into male and female facilities for privacy. I would say that sanitation was the biggest problem for women in this area before this block was built. It was so difficult to find a place to go to the toilet.
The conditions are so crowded here that there isn't a spare place and having no privacy whatsoever was awful. Now the popularity of good hygiene and sanitation has spread. Everyone wants clean latrines and a clean and private place to wash. There are many benefits from this block. We generate income and our children are much cleaner and healthier now.
Our community decided that all children can use the facilities for free. As women we have more time now to spend on our household duties and can feed and clean our children better.
We started work four years ago with WaterAid. It took us six months to work together to get a water point in our community.
We also worked long and hard on changing our hygiene behaviour. Then it only took us one month working together to actually build this sanitation block."
Read the articles below for more information on WaterAid's work in Bangladesh:
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