UN News

by Mollika Wahab

Bangladesh Slums Demand Access to Clean Water

In keeping with World Environment Day 2003’s theme of Water,

we are excerpting this article from the UNDP Choices magazine,

showing how one local NGO is helping the slum dwellers of Dhaka to have access to clean water.

Rasheda Begum, a 25-year old garment factory worker, pays one taka and presses a hand pump to get a bucket of clean water from a water outlet, just around the corner from where she lives.

One taka for a 20-litre bucket of water is expensive considering that the municipality charges Tk 4.50 for 1,000 litres of water, but in the shantytown in Kalyanpur, a suburb of Dhaka, it is a sign of progress for Mrs. Begum, who lives with her husband, small son and mother-in-law in a one-room tin shack.

Just five years ago the only sources of water for the slum’s 500 families were wells and an intermittent supply from an illegally connected tap to the city’s water utility. For drinking water, the women and children had to wait in line for up to two hours to collect a pitcher or bucket of water from a local market or nearby houses where they often had to bribe guards and caretakers, or pay exorbitant prices.

Today the family uses water from a dug well behind their shack for bathing and washing, but for drinking and cooking, they get water from the slum’s “water point” - two hand pumps that draw water from an underground reservoir that is filled with piped water supplied by Dhaka’s water utility.

Change came to the shantytown when a group of families got together and decided to ask a local NGO for assistance in getting a proper and legal water connection.

To work around the obstacles that prevented access to clean water, the residents approached a Dhaka-based NGO, Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK) for help. DSK, an organization that has been working to promote health, clean water supply and sanitation in poor areas of Dhaka since the late 1980s, has established 88 water points in 70 slums, benefiting more than 200,000 people. About a dozen water points have been paid for and handed over to the user groups.

In 1998, UNDP, through its Local Initiative Facility for Urban Environment or LIFE, joined forces with DSK to empower community-based organizations to make the projects sustainable. LIFE, which helps city dwellers help themselves by finding locally inspired solutions to local problems, funds small-scale, low-cost projects which are proposed, planned and executed by local communities.

“We help make communities more aware and strengthen their position to go ahead and demand more service provisions,” says Tanzina Haque Hossain, national coordinator of LIFE in Bangladesh. LIFE saw this work as an opportunity to popularize the idea of “local initiative.”

“When we visited the slum area to provide healthcare, they asked us for a water point,” says Kalim Ullah, DSK’s coordinator for water and sanitation projects. It took nearly a year of meetings with community members to assess their needs, select a site, fix rules for water use and rates, and outline management plans. But eventually, the slum had its water point approved by DSK.

To install the water point, DSK loaned the slum community nearly Tk 43,000, which was sponsored by an international donor agency. Thirty-four out of the slum’s 500 families then formed a user group, which is charged with managing the water point and ensuring payment of water bills and loan installments to DSK.

The user group annually elects a water-point operating committee consisting of nine women, who take care of the water point and collect payments. The women members take turns each month to act as caretaker for the day-to-day running of the water point. In addition, a supporting advisory committee of five men is also elected annually to ensure security and maintenance of the water outlets, and to settle any disputes over bill payments.

The 34-member families pay a fixed charge of Tk 15 per week for using the water, but they have learned not to overuse or waste. The committee also sells water to non-members, charging one taka for a pitcher or bucket of water, and two takas, for bathing or washing clothes. The collection is used to repay the DSK loan, water bills, maintenance costs and the caretaker’s honorarium.