Our history

The Thirsty Third World Conference brings members of the UK water industry together. They decide to unite, to reach the millions of people living without clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene.

WaterAid is officially established on July 21, 1981. Our first projects start in Zambia and Sri Lanka.

WaterAid started operation in Bangladesh since 1986 as one of the lead actors in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector and is well experienced in innovating, scaling up and managing large scale projects targeting poor, vulnerable and excluded.

It has been registered with NGO Affairs Bureau since 1996. The geographic focus of WaterAid Bangladesh includes urban slums, hard-to-reach areas and eco-hazardous zones such as hill tract and hillocks, dry and arid barind tract, salinity-prone coastal belt, haor and flood-prone chars keeping an eye over the climate change implications.

We reached around 9.5 million people across the country with WASH services so far. We continue to enhance sector stakeholders’ capacity for establishing systems in program delivery and monitoring to facilitate pro-poor, gender sensitive, cost effective, and sustainable WASH services. We facilitate community people to demand their WASH rights; capacitate and sensitise Government and other duty bearers to respond to the peoples need; and advocate for the essential role of WASH in human development.