Bangladesh is one of the wettest countries in the world. In some coastal regions, the rainy season lasts for up to eight months of the year. These rains swell the rivers and bring fertile silt down from the higher ground to the country’s low-lying paddy fields – but they can also bring devastating floods.
Despite the abundance of water, millions of people in rural Bangladesh struggle to find access to clean drinking water. Hundreds of thousands of families are forced to wash dishes, bathe and drink from the same dirty ponds and water sources, posing a grave threat to public health. In spite of recent improvement, more than 100,000 under fives die from waterborne illnesses every year.
CAFOD is working with a local organisation – NGO Forum for Drinking Water Supply & Sanitation – to improve access to clean water in Bangladesh. The organisation helps communities to install sand filters that
clean up polluted and contaminated water supplies and to build tanks that collect rain water.
With CAFOD’s help, NGO Forum teaches health education and raises awareness about public hygiene – by helping families to build hygienic pit latrines that stop the spread of disease to ponds and rivers. The incidence of disease has reduced rapidly in these communities.
This is just one example of how CAFOD works in Bangladesh to enable poor communities to become self-reliant, bringing people together to discuss issues such as lack of clean drinking water, concern for the environment or literacy. CAFOD gives communities the resources and training to solve their own problems and to lift themselves out of poverty
and powerlessness.
Gobindapur village, Chittagong, Bangladesh
Akhi Rani Das, 24, points to the muddy fish pond where she used to collect drinking water. CAFOD has helped her family to install a system that collects clean rainwater.
1. [26369] Woman pointing
