Environment and Population Research Centre

The WASH Sector Development Plan (2011–2025) recognizes the absence of harmonized approaches as the root challenge to scaling up drinking water safety in Bangladesh. UNICEF is supporting the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) through the Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) and Policy Support Branch to re-engineer its approach to drinking water safety by integrating policy, systems strengthening & sustainable services delivery at national and sub-national levels. Some of the key contributions to the sector include the implementation of the UNICEF-DPHE Arsenic Safe Union model with the declaration of 106 Arsenic Safe Villages, reduction in arsenic contamination rates of new tubewells, a system for preventing elite capture of water points, and the adoption of the ASU model in a $240 million arsenic mitigation drinking water project using domestic resources. Relatedly, a Policy Support Branch has been established, the sector coordination mechanisms revised, WASH bottleneck analysis is ongoing & the National Implementation Plan on Arsenic has been reviewed: Next steps include the professionalisation of drilling by local drillers through a partnership with KTH, Sweden, the GoB and UNICEF.

DELTAP is a multi-disciplinary research project, where geologists, water treatment scientists and industrial design engineers join forces to develop an integrated approach towards small-scale piped water supply (SPWS) systems in the arsenic-affected Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. The project has started in 2016 with a field study in Bihar (India) with a focus on water quality mapping with mobile crowd participation. The coming years the research will continue with 3 PhD candidates, both in India and Bangladesh, with the ultimate aim to develop blueprints for end-user inclusive SPWS systems.

There are many people in the world who cannot access to the safe drinking water and appropriate sanitation. To halve these populations is one of the common goals for the world. In Bauniabad, one of the urban poor settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh, many aid agencies have been working to improve sanitation conditions. In recent years, biogas plants have been installed as sanitation and people have been sharing a part of installation cost. The purpose of this study is to clarify the background of how poor people came to prefer and to use the biogas plant system as sanitation and the effectiveness of the biogas plant through questionnaire to the local people, interview to the stakeholders, and water quality analysis. It was revealed that though still people showed the difficulties to share all the cost of installation of the biogas plant, with the combination of the education on public health, there is a possibility to accept the cost share when people could understand the benefit of the option to their health and life.