Bangladesh Program Update: November 2009

Completed Projects: 184 water points and 182 community toilets benefiting 15,563 people in three Dhaka slums.

See an overview of our work in Bangladesh.

5-year plan to benefit 75,000 people, expansion to Chittagong

Thanks to the support of our generous donors, we have completed a 3-year program with our local Bangladeshi partner organization, Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK). During that time we provided funding for 144 water systems and 177 community toilets and hygiene education benefiting over 12,500 people in the slums of Dhaka.

We have now prepared a 5-year plan (2009-2013) with DSK to benefit as many as 75,000 people. The final number of beneficiaries will depend on our ability to raise the needed funds. Although several million people live in Dhaka’s peri-urban slums of Kamrangir Char and Demra, with the numbers increasing daily, DSK is the only organization working to provide water and sanitation services to the people who live there. The 5-year plan also includes an expansion to the slums of Chittagong City, Bangladesh 2nd largest city, where approximately one-third of the population live in slum communities.

Improving Sanitation

Dhaka has only one sewage treatment plant; however its capacity is approximately 10% of the total sewage generated by the city. Chittagong, with the same size population as Chicago, is in even worse shape: it has no sewage treatment plant at all. Therefore, our plan over the next five years in Bangladesh will include implementing new systems to provide sanitation services to slum dwellers, such as the “vacutug” system for emptying pit toilets. DSK is also considering piloting a project which would involve converting the human waste into fertilizer that is safe for land application.

For millions of poor people living in informal settlements and rural areas, on-site human waste disposal is the only practical option. Conventional waterborne sewerage, like most of us have in the United States, where we flush our toilets and waste is carried through an underground pipeline to a sewage treatment plant, is hampered by a number of reasons for most developing countries.

In urban slum settlements, when the toilet pits become full, it is often not possible to cover up and relocate the pits. The space to relocate simply doesn’t exist. Thus, pits must be emptied manually or mechanically. DSK has successfully used the vacutug system in their other projects in Dhaka. When a household or community toilet tank is full, the vacutug unit comes to empty it and transport the toilet contents to the Pagla Sewage Treatment Plant. The toilet users are charged a fee for this service. These fees cover the salaries of the vacutug driver, two operators, and a manager, as well as pay for fuel and maintenance of the vacutug. So, they’ve already shown that this can be a totally self-sustaining system.

The vacutug is manufactured locally, making it easily serviceable. It’s also able to operate in narrow passageways where conventional tanker trucks cannot pass. And, obviously, it’s a much healthier option than manual emptying. The vacutug makes a brief appearance in this 2008 film from Bangladesh, so you can see what it looks like.

Micro-loans for water and toilets

We had a great visit with DSK in December 2008. Communities that benefit from DSK’s water and sanitation program actually pay 100% of the capital costs of their water points and toilets over time. Most loans are one to two years, with an annual interest rate of 10%. Therefore, in addition to our regular inspections of old and new water points and toilets, we focused on their internal record keeping, and found it to be excellent. We inspected water and toilet loan records kept in DSK’s headquarters and were able to match them all to DSK field office records and also to the on-site records kept by committees or individuals who are responsible for loan repayment.

While in the field office, Water 1st staff randomly selected a water point or toilet to visit, and within minutes we would visit that site (in other words, they were not given any warning of our visit). Once on-site, we found 100% of the records in order, including a loan agreement between DSK and the beneficiary; another document that is best described in the US as a “good-faith estimate,” detailing the various costs that make up the loan amount; and loan repayment records signed by field staff (matching field office records). It was quite impressive. They have a great system that is consistently used in all projects.

DSK’s current loan repayment rate for our projects is over 95%. This is a tremendous accomplishment and demonstrates the value that our beneficiaries place on this work.

A model for scaling up

The World Bank and others have visited our project sites and are impressed with what they are seeing. We are hoping this will influence their current loan agreements to the government of Bangladesh to upgrade the water supply system, and that DSK will be involved in helping organize slum communities to connect to the public water system because with our project we have proven that poor people value water and can pay a water bill.

Hygiene education in transient populations

Our water and sanitation beneficiaries also receive hygiene education training. An adult female from each household participates in hygiene education seminars given by DSK Community Health Workers (CHWs). The community is divided into hygiene groups, each group having 10 members. The training is scheduled in three sessions, each lasting an hour or two. The women sit together with the CHW, who facilitates a discussion of safe water and waterborne disease, personal hygiene, menstrual hygiene, and environmental sanitation knowledge and practices. The CHWs use illustrations to help with the hygiene messages.

About one to two months after the hygiene training, the groups begin a self-monitoring program to see how they are doing at adopting the behavior changes they have learned (such as washing hands after defecation). This group typically meets with the CHW once per month for six months, and the CHW and other group members are there to support and encourage the families who are having trouble with making changes in the hygiene habits.

One issue that we discussed during our December 2008 visit was how to make the benefits of hygiene education program last longer, given that the residents of the slum areas where we work are transient. People who live in a slum community, and have benefited from a water point, toilet, and hygiene education program may move to a different slum, and are replaced with new renters. These new renters have the benefit of the hardware, the water point and toilets, but not the hygiene education. Consequently, during our visit we discussed strategies to improve the ability to get hygiene messages to residents as they move into these compounds. This is an area we will continue to follow up on during our new five-year project.

Other technical issues

These were the other items discussed during our most recent visit:

Household-level chlorination: DSK has already piloted a program to encourage household-level chlorination of drinking water. Local promoters are trained and go house to house explaining the importance of the use of chlorine to eliminate bacteriological contamination of water. The promoters also sell the locally-manufactured bottles of chlorine, giving them an incentive to spread the work about its benefits. This is especially important in our projects that connect users to the Dhaka public water system. We will continue to support this program in our five-year project.
Slab Latrines: Although this is the lowest-cost design offered by DSK, we continue to find it to be problematic. First, the u-bend in the plastic plan was broken off on all the installations we visited. While this probably to make them easier to flush, it also removes a very important feature that makes the toilet hygienic: the water seal. In addition, this toilet design is very easy for homeowners to modify. We saw several owners that had connected a pipe from the toilet tank directly to the open sewer/lane drainage just outside the compound. By doing this, they were avoiding having to pay to have the toilet tank emptied. Therefore, we are requesting the DSK discontinue the use of this toilet design, except in very specific cases where it is the only technical option that will work. And in those cases, homeowners must be educated about the benefits of the water seal and the health hazards of draining the toilet into the street outside the compound.
Water storage tanks must be included on all water points: In some cases, DSK has made water points less expensive by designing installations without water storage. While this makes water points more affordable, water points that have no storage tank invite practices that are bound to be unhygienic, such as dipping hands into a container in order to get a drink of water or to fill another container. We observed compounds that were storing water in open buckets, inviting contamination from many sources. The presence of a storage tank would eliminate that issue. We have requested that DSK discontinue the practice of building water points without storage.

BANGLADESH LINKS:

In Tarabo slum of Demra community, DSK’s community health workers facilitated a “social map” of the slum, showing all the main features of the area including houses, roads, markets, water points and toilets. Non-functioning water points and unhygienic toilets are colored red.

The mapping exercise is repeated each year in the slum, to show the progress the people have made to address their water and sanitation problems. New water points and latrines in the updated map are colored green. This slum has made a lot of progress, and work will continue until spring 2009 when 100% of the people in the Tarabo slum will have access to safe water and hygienic toilets.

“Since we drilled the new well, our children our healthier. We find that we are now saving money because we don’t have to pay for medicines from the doctor. We are using that money to buy other things for our children like food and clothes and school books.” Resident of Demra slum."