WaterAid Bangladesh wins DFID grant to expand programme

Schoolchildren learn about good hygiene practices from flashcards.

Credit: WaterAid / Abir Abdullah

WaterAid Bangladesh has just secured a £15.5 million grant from the UK's Department for International Development to expand its programme helping vulnerable communities in difficult environments over the next five years.

The initiative, called Advancing Sustainable Environmental Health (ASEH), will enable WaterAid and its partner organisations to make lasting improvements to the health, quality of life and livelihoods of millions more people in poor rural and urban communities.

Rural areas

WaterAid currently works with four partners in rural areas; VERC, UST, Green Hill and NGO-Forum.

The work with each of them will expand and one or two more partners will be engaged. The initiative will help 1.3 million poor rural people benefit from improved personal hygiene practices, sanitation and safe water supplies.

Urban areas

The initiative will expand WaterAid and its urban partner organisations' current work in the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong, and will expand into new towns, to help a total of 940,000 people.

The work helps communities in slum areas to establish communal self-managed waterpoints and sanitation blocks, and to develop a good understanding of safe hygiene.

The work has developed with the NGOs acting as intermediaries between the communities and the city water authorities to negotiate connections to the city water supplies.

A waterpoint established by a WaterAid/DSK project in Dhaka.

Credit: WaterAid / Liba Taylor

The approach

The initiative will build on WaterAid Bangladesh's approach of generating demand for water and sanitation first.

This means that rather than WaterAid and its partner organisations going into communities and constructing water facilities and latrines wherever they are lacking, they will run awareness campaigns about the importance of good hygiene.

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.

WaterAid and its partners will then help the communities to approach the local government departments responsible for water and sanitation and work with them to establish new facilities.

This approach makes the new facilities a lot more sustainable as communities who recognise the importance of good hygiene will have a vested interest in helping establish the facilities, maintaining them in the long run and keeping up good hygiene practices.

Communities will be trained to manage the water supply facilities, and they will be helped to establish savings schemes so that they can fully cover any maintenance costs themselves.

The aim is for every single member of each of the rural communities to stop defecating in open places and to safely dispose of their faeces, and for at least 95% of urban communities to regularly use latrines.

In both rural and urban areas at least 85% of people should adopt key hygiene practices such as handling and storing their drinking water safely, washing utensils carefully and regularly washing their hands with soap after going to the toilet and before eating.

In urban areas the same percentage should separate and dispose of their household waste. As a result water- and sanitation-related illnesses such as diarrhoeal disease will fall, and households will be able to save the money they used to have to spend on curative medical treatment.

Parents will also be able to earn more as they will lose fewer days off work due to tending sick children.

Deaths from diarrhoeal disease are expected to reduce by 30% over the five year period. For malnourished children the risk of death from diarrhoea is typically around 50% and the widespread death of young children encourages people to have larger families.

It is hoped that in the long term the rate of pregnancies will decrease. This will reduce women's exposure to pregnancy-related complications in a country with a high maternal mortality rate, and slow down the expansion of population which now affects whole communities through pressure on scarce resources and economic migration.

Where there are currently no water supplies and latrines, women and girls often have to spend hours each day walking to remote locations to fetch water for their families, or to find somewhere secluded to go to the toilet.

They will especially benefit from new water and sanitation facilities close to home as they will have more time available for other activities such as going to school, income generating work, housework or simple relaxation.

The long-term aim

As well as improving the lives of the communities directly targeted by the initiative, the aim is that other local, national and regional agencies will be influenced to themselves adopt and adapt the participatory 'total sanitation' approach.

The initiative aims to establish an alternative approach to the provision of water and sanitation facilities alone. It aims to prove that ensuring that improved hygiene and sanitation practices accompany new water supplies and latrines is the key to delivering long-lasting health benefits to poor communities.

WaterAid will document its activities and establish a resource and training network to help other organisations learn from its approach.