63, the woman selected was the wife of a male committee member, Ruhul Amin, who was also Gano Milon’s CM.51 These findings support existing research that finds that though the burden of drinking water management disproportionately falls on women, they often have less decision- making authority responsibilities related to it (De Guzman et al. 2023). The project leads UNICEF and DPHE did not seem to have a process or practice in place to address the lack of decision-making power by women on the management committee.
projects in consultation with each other. If they did, then it would be possible to deliver more benefits to the grassroots level poor. But NGOs do not do such type of coordination among themselves.” He gave an example of what he meant. He said Gano Milon had installed 500 new latrines and repaired 800 old latrines in site 63. It was his assessment that after their effort, the need for more latrines had been met. However, the World Bank, DPHE, and another NGO have funding to build latrines, and so they are going to duplicate Gano Milon’s efforts in this
community even though they are not needed, rather than provide other resources that the community actually needs with their funding.52
The only evidence that we found of any of the NGOs educating on the right to water was in site 27. In addition to the MAR management committee, AOSED formed a “water rights committee” as part of a Khulna-wide initiative they are part of to organize people in the region against the privatization of water and to establish water as a human right. According to our ethnographer, no one in the village seemed to know anything about this movement when he spoke with them, so it does not seem there was an additional effort to build the community’s understanding of their rights beyond the creation of the committee.
In site 20, there was a youth group doing awareness raising on WASH activities. It was not political activism, but it was a preexisting grassroots group providing education about clean drinking water, and Mukti Foundation did not work with them.
In site 2 and 58, community members reported that in their communities, the NGOs create groups or associations around projects, but when the NGO leaves and the project is done, people don’t continue to work together. In site 2, LOCUS is the NGO working on the MAR.
There are at least six other NGOs working on health and clean water. Among all these NGOs,
52 Interview with Pankaj Sarker by Rakib Uddin Juwel. 28 Feb 2015. Site 63 Report.
only one was found to be doing any leadership development with community members, and it was not LOCOS. The community mobilizer for LOCUS, Dulali, said that she did not coordinate with the other NGOs because she did not get any such instructions from her office to do so.53
In site 11, community members had created a youth club, established in 1995, to help poor villagers and to mobilize the youth in social welfare activities. This was a community-based initiative that was not installed by an NGO or other outside agency. The youth club performed both charitable and activist activities. An example of their activism includes stopping all shrimp cultivation in the village.54 The elites and landlords who owned and made considerable profits from the shrimp farms there were strongly opposed to stopping shrimping and held considerable power. The youth club organized with the poor members of the community against these elites to stop shrimp cultivation, and were able to win a legal battle to officially ban it. LOCOS did not coordinate with this group. In fact, when LOCOS formed the MAR water management
committee, two out of five of the members they selected did not even live in the village. It seems they did not utilize or build upon local capacity to address the drinking water problem, and to some extent by bringing in outsiders to the management committee, bypassed it.
In site 56, when asked if JJS, the MAR NGO, coordinates with other NGOs in the
community, the JJS employee Abdul Malek explained that “If different NGOs work on the same project of the same donor, then the NGOs work together. Otherwise, usually no project is
implemented together with the NGOs [in the same community].” He mentioned that JJS started
53 CM Dulali Sarder interviewed by Md. Newazul Maula 12 Jan 2015. Site 2 Report.
54 Shrimp cultivation is done mainly for export and profit, rather than to provide a food source for local people. It is Bangladesh’s third largest export after garments and jute products. Shrimp farming pollutes the groundwater with shrimp feed and fertilizer. Salt from the shrimp ponds can seep into the groundwater and the soil, affecting drinking water and making the land unsuitable for rice cultivation or livestock grazing, contributing to local food insecurity.
Construction of canals and dikes for shrimp farming cause flooding and waterlogging, and the increase in
sedimentation reduces existing river flow capacity. Shrimp farming in Bangladesh is often unregulated, with water from shrimp farms often discharged into common water sources untreated (Matin et al. 2016).
as a more grassroots organization working in very remote areas, but now is a national NGO that works all over the country. They are part of a national collaboration called “NGO Forum” at the national level. Though he could not articulate how JJS was working to develop the community’s ability to network or build power for political change, it seems he did have a narrative about how JJS was working to build their own network and political power.
In site 58, the NGO’s technical supervisor was interviewed, and he could not provide any information about how JJS increases the capacity of the villagers. However, he provided an example of increasing the capacity of the staff at JJS. He said they provide different types of training to develop their workers’ skills. He said he had attended many of these trainings himself.55 From this we can see that he understands what leadership development and capacity building can look like, even though they are not doing any such activities in the community. He said that JJS, nor any of the other NGOs working on drinking water in the community,
collaborate in any way. He explained this is because there is no technological similarity between the MAR and the other drinking water projects. “Though different NGOs are working on similar projects, due to their project designs they cannot work with other NGOs.” This of course is not true. Moreover, the success of community managed drinking water interventions in this region like the MAR depend on social factors, not simply technological innovation.
For the most part, the only capacity attempted to be built in these communities was the capacity of the MAR management committee members to understand the technical aspects of the MAR and to meet regularly. This is not equivalent to building the community’s capacity to advocate for themselves. The members of the water management committee were not always even members of the community (sites 11 and 27), they didn’t receive much information about
55 JJS TS Moshiur Rahman interviewed by Rakib Uddin Juwel 28 Mar 2015. Site 58 Report.
the MAR, and in most cases the 60 beneficiaries of the MAR were not engaged at all. It does not seem that capacity building was part of the project design. Rather, the creation of the
management committee here seemed to be designed to increase the efficiency of the project (Streeten 1980), or to create an illusion of community participation, though it was only the participation of the elites . These are elements of a basic needs approach. The project leads UNICEF and DPHE did not have a process or practices in place to build the capacity of the communities or to encourage the NGOs to work together rather than to duplicate efforts.