Home 
Topics Water Country Water Actions Bangladesh
 | |
Country Water Action: Bangladesh
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Far from being desperate housewives, women in Bangladesh have always been important users and managers of agricultural water, especially during and after harvesting season. But women have never been more involved in community decisionmaking that greatly affects them until 2002 when ADB’s Second Small-Scale Water Resources Development Sector Project sought to engage their active involvement.
The project, with its intensified consultation and participation approach, involves developing small-scale water resources infrastructures to improve the sustainability of water resources, especially for agriculture. It directly involves women through the establishment of Water Management Cooperative Associations (WMCAs) that engage in the selection, design, implementation, and operations and maintenance (O&M) of such water management systems. In this way, the project is helping to upgrade Bangladesh women's lives.
Since December 2006, women have become active participants of these WMCAs, and they comprise almost a third of WMCAs’ management committees. They have also entered into construction work of water resources infrastructures as members of local labor cooperatives. The micro-credit livelihood enterprises, which are an added bonus of the project, are headed by women.
ADB Project Engineer Kenichi Yokoyama said, “By introducing a consultation and participation mechanism, the people, especially the women, are more motivated to address their problems on their own.”
The magnitude of the water resources development project in Bangladesh is an indication of just how badly needed water resource management is for rural life in this country. With the exception of the 3 districts of the semi-autonomous region of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, this project covers 61 out of the country’s 64 districts. It is in these rural areas where 90% of the country’s poor live, and majority of them depend on agriculture—the sector that uses the largest volume of water.
But the biggest water challenge for the country is neither scarcity nor water allocation. In Bangladesh, most of the time there is too much water, and people do not compete for it. The challenge is to manage the water, by keeping it out of the agricultural areas during perennial floods, by getting the excess water out of the agricultural area, and by providing irrigation during the dry season.
This is where ADB’s project comes in. Targeting 280,000 farming households, or 1.7 million people, the project is increasing awareness and conducting training courses in conserving water and improving the productivity of land, wetlands, and water bodies for agriculture.
Bangladesh women are the success factors of the project. Their involvement in all project stages is vital to the project’s continuing success.
Stage 1—Identifying water management projects
Rural women are interviewed as part of Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRA) exercises designed to confirm communities’ commitments to assume responsibility for O&M once the infrastructure is completed. A total of 510 PRAs have been conducted to date by female project staff trained on gender issues, and around 70-75 women participate in each PRA.
Stage 2—Establishing the WMCAs
Forming WMCAs is important as these organizations are to be communities’ life-long vehicles for working with each other and with the government, particularly through consultation, inclusive decisionmaking, and management of their social and economic lives. To date, WMCAs have been organized in every community with the help of NGOs. One-third of these WMCAs’ members are women, many of whom occupy seats in WMCAs’ management committees.
Stage 3—Designing and implementing projects
Drawing on lessons from previous projects, WMCAs then work with the local government and the district Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) in designing the needed water infrastructure and implementing the project. Women, particularly the poor, contribute manual labor in the construction through Labor Contracting Societies (LCS), which are local labor cooperatives in charge of digging and other “earthworks.” About 3, 364 women construction workers are now part of LCS crews and earn wages that are equal to men’s.
Four years have passed since the project began. Some WMCAs have already managed to build their capital assets to over $1,000 with savings for O&M, and are raising their capital assets even further through micro-credit activities, such as vegetable growing, cattle and poultry raising, and culture fisheries in coastal regions. With some of the water infrastructures in place, access to water has become easier, allowing the most destitute of women to venture into backyard livelihood like vegetable gardening and poultry raising to augment the family income.
As beneficiaries of the project, women’s social and economic profile has significantly improved considering there has been a rise in crop production, especially for rice, and higher value crops such as garlic and onions are being produced. Improved irrigation facilities and flood control now allow farming households to plant two to three crops a year rather than just one; and the recovery of credit among the WMCAs is recorded at 98%. The value of agricultural land has also appreciated substantially and more jobs have been generated from construction work, while wage rates have also increased.
Through their constant engagement, women are not just beneficiaries of the project anymore. Bangladesh women are fast becoming change agents, as they start to make their community a part of their homes, and that progress in the community also means a better life at home.
While much still needs to be done—the project is just about 65% complete—the project team is confident that it will be completed on time by June 2009 because of the “enthusiastic, interested, and motivated beneficiaries groups, particularly women members, as well as motivated project and LGED core staff.” In December 2006, the project team was hailed as one of the three best performing ADB-supported project teams in Bangladesh.
The Government of Bangladesh has already requested a third phase of this small-scale water resources project to spread the benefits to more poor rural people.
| © 2008 Asian Development Bank Privacy | Terms of Use |
 Top of page |
