The Guidelines for Participatory Water Management (GPWM) were drafted and approved by the Bangladesh's Ministry of Water Resources in 2000 to operationalize the National Water Policy. The GPWM is the final document combining the experiences of the EIP, DDP, LRP, FAP and the plethora of guidelines and manuals for beneficiary participation that were created throughout the 1990s. The main purpose of the GPWM is to increase and improve stakeholder participation/involvement in water management, give local stakeholders a decisive voice at every stage of water management and raise environmental awareness among the local stakeholders and the implementing agencies in relation to flood control, drainage, irrigation and other surface/ground water management activities. The GPWM's definition of participation emphasizes wider stakeholder consultation by explicitly including local stakeholders, various levels of Water Management Organizations (WMOs), Local Government Institutions (LGIs), NGOs, community level self-help groups, private sector providers, and other public sector agencies.
In this period, GoN supported several studies in the Bangladesh estuary, including the Meghna Estuary Study (MES) 1995-2001, a project under the FAP; Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM, starting in 2000, see below); and the Estuary Development Program (EDP, 2007-2011). In continuation of MES and ICZM, the EDP formed the basis of the long-term planning for coastal development. Among other things, the EDP included hydrological studies (e.g. on river flows and sediment) and proposals for coastal protection and development. Technology development and knowledge sharing were important aspects. In addition, the Char Development and Settlement Project (CDSP) which started in 1994 as a follow-up to the Land Reclamation Project (LRP), continued to focus on char development and settlement in the delta.
Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM): The concept of ICZM was already shaped in the 1980s and obtained a political dimension during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Experiences showed that there was no single generally applicable theory to guide coastal planning. Instead, country-specific approaches have to be identified, taking into account the many aspects of coastal development. After a study tour in 1999, a high-level Bangladesh delegation published a report, ‘ICZM: concept and issues’, which was adopted by the Government. A series of meetings with donors ultimately led in 2000 to the Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan project, with financial and technical assistance from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The project had three major outputs: the Coastal Zone Policy (approved by the cabinet in January 2005), the Coastal Development Strategy (adopted by the Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee in February 2006) and the Priority Investment Programme (also adopted in 2006).
A major project in this period was the Integrated Planning for Sustainable Water Management (IPSWAM) project. This project, implemented by the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), aimed to strengthen planning capacity of local water management organizations and local government bodies, as well as national bodies, notably the BWDB. IPSWAM followed a two-track intervention approach:
- Piloting and demonstrating a practical approach in nine polders in the south-west and south-central zones of Bangladesh.
- Institutional strengthening of relevant BWDB offices and dissemination of integrated and participatory water management practices throughout the BWDB.
The project started in November 2003 for a period of five years. Due to cyclone damage it was extended twice and terminated in June 2011. The project was particularly successful in terms of developing the participatory approaches for the WMOs and improving water management in the polders.
In this period the GoN also started co-financing water management projects implemented by multilateral agencies such as the Asian Development Bank and World Bank. A list of all water projects (co-)funded by GoN is attached, under one of the last bullets.
WASH
In this period the focus of Dutch support for WASH shifted to the rural areas and community involvement in conformity with the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Bangladesh National Policy on Safe Water Supply and Sanitation. Two of the eight Millennium Development Goals endorsed by the UN in 2000 related to the reduction of child mortality and to drinking water and sanitation:
- Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality - Reduce the mortality rate among children under the age of by two-thirds by 2015
- Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability – halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.
In Bangladesh new policies and strategies were framed to support the WASH activities: the National Policy for Arsenic Mitigation in 2004 and the Pro-poor Strategy for the Water and Sanitation Sector and the National Sanitation Strategy in 2005 .
A bottom-up approach called Community-led Total Sanitation was also developed to improve the WASH situation in Bangladesh.
The Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach in Bangladesh was developed by Dr. Kamal Kar in 1999-2000 to bring about sustainable improvements in sanitation and hygiene practices in rural communities. The approach was aimed at changing everyone's behavior through a process of "triggering", leading to spontaneous and long-term abandonment of open defecation practices. It focused on creating a spontaneous and long-lasting change in the behavior of an entire community. The term "triggering" is central to the CLTS process, referring to ways of igniting community interest in ending open defecation. Once the motivation is there, the building of simple but safe toilets, such as improved pit latrines, is encouraged, but not funded. CLTS involves actions leading to increased self-respect and pride in one's community. It also involves shame and disgust about one's own and others’ open defecation behaviors. CLTS takes an approach to rural sanitation that works without hardware subsidies and that facilitates communities to recognize the problem of open defecation and take collective action to clean up and become ‘open defecation free’ (ODF). CLTS often promotes local production of hardware such as concrete latrine slabs, thereby promoting local entrepreneurship, for example by providing training in the construction of latrines, slab production and the development of a sanitation business.
CLTS became a Bangladesh success story. The CLTS approach was much more effective than just installing subsidized latrines, and by around 2011 it had become an established approach. CLTS spread fast inside and outside Bangladesh, with both Bangladeshi and (international) NGOs adopting the approach. Non-governmental organizations often took the lead when CLTS was first introduced in a country. Local governments might reward communities by certifying their ‘open defecation free’ (ODF) status. Today CLTS is applied in more than 60 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific and the Middle East, and governments are increasingly taking the lead in scaling up CLTS. Many governments have also adopted CLTS as a national policy.
The Government of Bangladesh recognized that NGOs played a significant role in improving the WASH situation. A partnership approach to sanitation was adopted, whereby local government institutions took a central role and joined forces with the NGOs and the private sector, and the Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) provided technical assistance and guidance. During this period the Netherlands became an important donor for WASH activities of NGOs in Bangladesh, especially those of BRAC through the BRAC WASH program (2006-2015).
BRAC is a large international development organization established in Bangladesh after independence in 1972. It provides a wide range of services, including public healthcare with an initial focus on curative care through paramedics and a self-financing health insurance scheme with substantial funding for integrated healthcare services. Later, BRAC also addressed preventive care, in which context WASH became important. BRAC’s WASH approach to the building and improvement of toilets combines a broad range of activities involving awareness-raising, small loans for poorer households, subsidies for the poorest and loans and training for local entrepreneurs. The BRAC WASH program, implemented with Dutch support from 2006 to 2015, has helped over 39 million people (including the poor and ultra-poor) to gain access to hygienic latrines and provided 2.3 million people with access to safe water across 250 sub-districts of Bangladesh. More than 65,000 gender-balanced Village WASH Committees with representatives from every income group have been set up. IRC of the Netherlands was involved as a knowledge partner.
Since 2016, with Netherlands support, BRAC’s WASH services are not a standalone program anymore but are integrated in following programs: BRAC Microfinance, Health, Nutrition and Population Program (HNPP), Ultra Poor Graduation Program (UPGP), and BRAC Education Program (BEP).
Sources & Recommended literature
