Bangladesh Background Information

Bangladesh is considered the world’s most densely populated country with 2,200 people per square mile. Dhaka, Bangladesh is one of Asia’s fastest growing cities and home to 4 million squatters who live in slum communities where they do not have legal access to basic services, such as water. The slum population in Dhaka is increasing rapidly with over 150,000 new residents each year arriving from rural areas seeking a better life for their families.

In these squatter settlements, the poor are forced to buy water of unknown quality at very expensive rates from illegal connections and are subjected to exploitation by the slum power structure. Squatters also draw water from the severely polluted Buriganga River, which flows through Dhaka and contains both the industrial and human waste from the entire city and surrounding areas.

Surprisingly, the world's poorest people can wind up paying up to 100 times more for water than wealthier users who draw their baths from subsidized water systems. The problem is that municipal pipelines invariably reach the wealthiest clients first, even though they are often built with aid from governments and international institutions with the goal of making water more accessible to the poor. Poor families, including millions in squatter villages, are then required to pay gourmet prices for often-polluted drinking water. A review of water vending in 16 Third World countries calculated the cost gap between vendor and tap water. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, vendors charge 100 times as much as public water systems; in Karachi, Pakistan, 83 times more; and in Jakarta, Indonesia, 60 times more. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, residents pay an average of about 15 times the cost for water that residents with legal connections pay.

The sanitation situation is equally severe. Hanging latrines, which deposit waste directly into waterways, are a common feature of the slums and are extremely unhygienic. The results of life in these filthy and sub-human environments are not surprising: over 325,000 children die each year in Bangladesh, and the leading killer is diarrhea caused by water-related disease.