National WASH Coalition
The WSSCC-Bangladesh chapter (WSSCC-B) includes 36 organizations; national and international NGOs, government departments, development partners and academia.
Focus
The chapter aims to create space for marginalized people to access standard water and sanitation services. WSSCC-B helps to organize strong grassroots involvement, which is essential both to reach the Millennium Development Goals and the Government of Bangladesh's target of universal sanitation by 2013.
Milestones and achievements
As early as 2004 the Bangladesh chapter began a process of grassroots consultations. These have now gained momentum nationwide, with other partners joining in.
The overall objective of the consultations is to create a bottom-up process. The meetings are a place where poor and marginalized people can share their ideas and opinions. In that way, they can raise their voices to reach policy makers and affect the policy process. Beyond that, they learn more about government policies and funding mechanisms, such as the subsidy targeting the very poor, and can start to speak for themselves. Local level consultations are feeding into regional and national levels, and into Sacosan (the South Asian Conference on Sanitation – its first conference was held in Dhaka in 2003). The achievements so far have been:
- organization of 556 grassroots consultations involving 11,120 people (up till 2010)
- organization of National Grassroots Conventions in 2008 and 2010
- grassroots participation was one of the main themes of the Government to celebrate the International Year of Sanitation in 2008.
To consolidate the grassroots mechanism at local and national level, the chapter recognizes the need for strong advocacy, and for the involvement of the media support and the active participation of women. Constant and concerted efforts are needed to turn the concept into reality and success.
