A day in the life of

Rokeya Ahmed, Senior Programme Coordinator, Advocacy, Bangladesh.

"As an Advocacy Programme Coordinator, my responsibility is to represent WaterAid Bangladesh in different forums, policy level meetings and with the media.

More than two million people live in Dhaka’s slums.

Credit: Martin Argles

The traffic is really bad in Dhaka City and as we struggle a lot to get from one part to another I live in the North of the city within one kilometre of my office and my children's school. Every morning at 8am I drop my two children in their school and start work at 8:15. Most days, I am the first one there.

We have five working days at WaterAid: Sunday to Thursday. Friday and Saturday are the weekend. But as government offices only have Friday as the weekend I often work on Saturday's too so that I can contact the government staff.

From June to October 2003 there was a massive campaign in Bangladesh for a people-centred community-led sanitation programme.

At present only 33% of people in Bangladesh have sanitation and this results in massive surface water contamination problems. Each year 125,000 children under five die in Bangladesh from diarrhoeal diseases. That is 342 children every day.

The government has committed itself to achieve total sanitation by 2010 and WaterAid Bangladesh is one of the main organisations involved in the sanitation campaign.

This community based campaign initially began as the total rural sanitation project, an innovative approach developed by WaterAid and its rural partner, VERC, which looked at generating demand for water and sanitation before any project began.

The idea is that once communities learn the link between bad hygiene and disease they will improve their hygiene practices and want to establish water and sanitation facilities themselves.

The approach showed remarkable successes when communities who had had no direct involvement in the scheme themselves saw the benefits in other villages and wanted to establish water and sanitation facilities as well. And so since 2001 WaterAid has been working with decision makers and other organisations to scale up the approach and use it at a wider level in both urban and rural areas.

On 20 September I was due to speak about WaterAid and its partners' experiences on sanitation at a high level motivational meeting with journalists in the National Press Club in the centre of Dhaka city.

The main purpose of the meeting was to motivate the journalists for positive features and news on both the sanitation campaign and the South Asia Conference on Sanitation. I had only received the invitation two days earlier, but as this was a great opportunity for us I quickly confirmed my participation in the meeting.

By learning about the health benefits and the necessities of clean water and effective sanitation communities are more encouraged to take action and change their surroundings.

Credit: WaterAid / Abir Abdullah

But then, on the same day that I received the invitation I came home to find that my children would have to attend school on Saturday 20 instead of Sunday 21 because a main political party had called a strike. 'Strikes' are not uncommon phenomena in Bangladesh! But, as my children's school finished at 1pm, and our child minder is unavailable on Saturdays, I now had to work out how to balance this important meeting and collecting my children.

So, on the day of the meeting, I dropped my children at school and drove through Dhaka's traffic to get to the Press Club. Following talks from the Minister of Rural Development, the Dhaka City Mayor and the Secretary of Rural Development Division an engineer from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology gave his speech, where he mainly emphasized the hardware issues, latrine design and construction. Then my turn came.

As WaterAid Bangladesh and partners give equal emphasis on awareness building on hygienic behaviour and community empowerment in my speech I described our activities in detail to explain the importance of the software part, and how the communities must be involved at all stages. After finishing my speech, the journalists were enthused and asked me a lot of questions on the campaign and WaterAid's work.

By the time the meeting had finished and I had rushed through Dhaka's traffic to collect my children it was 2:30pm. All the children had left school and my children were waiting for me with anxiety. Thankfully though my son's teacher had waited with them and they were safe and sound.

But the outcome of the meeting was very successful. The government declared October as sanitation month, and so during October 2003 there was very good coverage of sanitation in the media, including a TV interview on Channel 1. This has greatly helped to build public awareness on the importance of sanitation which will hopefully impact upon those most in need in Bangladesh."

WaterAid in Bangladesh

Examples of our work in Bangladesh