Having or practicing cross-issue awareness is being attentive to the ways that social norms, customs, or prevailing injustices may intersect with and impact an issue, in this case access to clean drinking water, and the creation of a strategy for addressing these. In other words, paying attention to and planning for the ways in which the issue that is the focus – in the case of the MAR, clean drinking water – is interactive with other norms that are present in the
community that could impact whether or how the drinking water is utilized. Two cross-cutting issues reflected in the data were norms around drinking water and gender.
46 Exceptions include site 58 where the marginalized Hindu groups were chosen for the MAR and user list and site 63 where a few Rishi families were included. In these sites, the NGO intentionally targeted poor and marginalized groups for the user lists.
4.2.1 Drinking water norms
Norms about water impacted this project because, for example, community members sometimes held spiritual beliefs about water purity that don’t align with what science teaches us about it. These kinds of beliefs present a challenge for the MAR because people do not believe the MAR will deliver better water than what they already have access to; however, some NGOs used creative ways of working with these beliefs, but others did not engage with prevalent beliefs about water at all.
In two sites there was evidence that the community held spiritual beliefs about their drinking water sources that could present a challenge to the MAR. In site 25, community members believe that the Kalibari pond is blessed by the Hindu mother Kali and that no matter how contaminated it becomes, it will never harm them. A participant in a women’s focus group discussion said, “There is no disease among us even after drinking the water directly from this pond because there is blessing of Kali goddess in Kali Bari pond.” 47 The Community Mobilizer in site 25, Subrata Mandal, said “The villagers do not think that MAR will have an impact on the quality of water. That’s why we do not even tell them anything in this regard during the monthly meeting. In the monthly meeting we discuss only the prescribed issues from MAR.”48
In site 20 which is another site managed by the Mukti Foundation, residents believe that whether any new source of drinking water is safe depends on divine power. In this village, the Mukti Foundation took this belief seriously and the NGO representatives were present at the prayer meeting organized by the villagers regarding the MAR.49
47 Kabita Mandal, participant in a women’s focus group conducted by Rakib Uddin Juwel 28 Jan 2015. Site 25 Report.
48 CM Subrata Mandal interviewed by Rakib Uddin Juwel 28 Jan 2015. Site 25 Report.
49 Mukti Foundation, the organization that worked in these two sites, was founded in honor of Begum Monsura Mohiuddin, a former politician and member of the Jatiya party, which has an Islamic ideology. It may be that the Multi Foundation engaged with a community’s Islamic spiritual beliefs but not another community’s Hindu spiritual
In sites 34, 35, and 58 people reported that they tend to prefer surface water to the taste of ground water sources like the MAR.50 Neither of the NGOs working in these sites were
addressing the issue of the taste of MAR’s water head on. In site 34, the community mobilizer had attempted to do education around clean water. In site 35 no education on clean water was reported or observed, and Shushilan’s technical supervisor Shariful Islam said in an interview that he believes villagers would just get used to the taste over time. In site 58, the NGO JJS reported raising awareness about safe water and health in the community.
Though many NGOs seemed to be doing education on water safety in general, few reported teaching about the specific benefits of the MAR over other sources. None of the NGOs seemed to be engaging with the issues of taste or smell of the water as possible challenges to usage. The project leads UNICEF and DPHE did not seem to have clear guidance about
processes or practices NGOs should use to address beliefs about water that would challenge the MARs success.
4.2.2 Gender norms
There were two main ways that gender norms were found to intersect with this project.
One, there was a report that women in one community did not feel comfortable gathering water from the MAR location because of where it was located. Since women are primarily responsible for gathering water in this region, this presents a barrier to the MAR’s use and sustainability.
Two, there was guidance that the MAR water management committees should be gender-mixed,
beliefs due to the employees’ own spiritual tradition and bias. Regardless, it is clear from the data that in one site there was no engagement with local spiritual beliefs, and in another there was.
50 Another groundwater source common in the region is tube wells.
but not much effort was made to meaningfully follow this guidance, presumably due to existing gender norms around decision-making.
In site 63, due to concerns about modesty the women reported that they usually gather water from tube wells in the morning or afternoon when men’s presence on the road is low; it is a cultural norm in this community that women should not be seen by anyone other than their husbands. However, the MAR’s site was selected next to the union council and the market, so men are present consistently throughout the day. It’s not possible for women to collect the water under these circumstances and so they send their young children instead. Members of a female focus group reported feeling concerned about the physical stress of carrying heavy water on their small bodies. This presents a challenge that may affect the sustainability of the MAR, but it did not seem that this issue was seriously considered during the selection of this site. The NGO in this site did not have a plan to overcome this barrier to women collecting water. It did not seem this was a key concern during site selection, either.
Blanchett’s (2014) report found that the majority of the people serving the MAR water management committees in the 20 pilot sites were men. For the scale up to the 75 sites, Dr.
Matin told the NGOs that the committees should be gender mixed. We found that each
committee had at least one woman, but none of them had more than one. It is unclear whether more women were selected for the committees for the scale up than were selected for the 20 pilot sites, since it remained the case that men were the vast majority of the committee members. The single women members of the MAR management committee were not observed to exercise meaningful decision-making power vis-à-vis their male counterparts in most of the communities, and seemed to be tokenized by the appointment more than anything. There was some evidence they were selected because of their proximity to the men on the committee. For example, in site
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.