Consultation Workshop: Peoples’ Plan of Action for River Basin Management

Consultation Workshop: Peoples’ Plan of Action for Management of Rivers in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh

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From: <uttaran.dhaka@gmail.com>

Dear all, greetings from Uttaran! 

We have the pleasure to invite you to “Consultation Workshop: Peoples’ Plan of Action for Management of Rivers in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh”, on January 30-31, 2010, at IDRT, Uttaran, in Tala, Satkhiria. The consultation workshop will bring together community representatives from eleven river basins in southwest coastal region in Bangladesh to present findings from basin based consultation and develop a regional plan of action for community based river basin management. “Technical and scientific experts” from Centre for Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) and Institute of Water Modeling (IWM) will also join the program. 

Many of you are aware of the chronic environmental crisis of waterloging in southwest region that plagues the region for more than a decade and every year hundreds of thousands of hectares of land goes under water for five to six months creating suffering for more than half a million people and indirectly affecting million more people.  Uttaran has been working closely with communities for decades and learned that the crisis has a long history that lies in development interventions on the river system in the region, imposing engineering-structural solutions, without considering the local water and river management knowledge and practice. Structural-engineering solutions implemented by government institutions, with finance and technical advice from international lending agencies, have not solved the problem. Uttaran has been learning and advocating indigenous water and river management practices from the communities to find sustainable solution. 

It is also important to take note that the climate change will further exacerbate the situation in southwest and unless urgent action are taken, millions of people living on the river basins in southwest will suffer. Uttaran has learned from the communities that adaptation to climate change induced sea level rise and its impact on livelihood can only be found in community wisdom and indigenous water and river management practices. For years Uttaran has been working together with Paani Committee, a community forum focused on water and river management, to facilitate such a process. 

Community participation has been a jargon used  too often in development arena but allowing the communities to review problems and plan their own solutions rarely happens. Uttaran thinks that a real participatory process can function where communities are provided with adequate space to develop their own plans and proposals. In this respect, over the last few months, Uttaran, together with Paani Committee, has been facilitating a consultative process in eleven river basin in southwest to learn more about the crisis and identify environmentally sound and economically viable solutions. This workshop will be a culmination of findings from these consultations to develop a regional plan of action for community based river basin management in southwest coastal Bangladesh. 

Uttaran experience has shown that community based river basin management and climate change adaptation is inseparably linked in the context of southwest coastal Bangladesh. We appreciate your active participation in the consultation workshop.

For any further enquries please contact: <uttaran.dhaka@gmail.com>

Please visit http://riversandcommunities.wordpress.com/ for regularly updated information linking knowledge, policy and practice for community based river basin management in southwest.

You can also find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=37069773660 

Thanking you, 

Shahidul Islam

Director, Uttaran

Consultation Workshop: Peoples’ Plan of Action for Management of Rivers in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh

Date: January 30-31, 2010

Venue: IDRT, Uttaran, Tala, Satkhira, Bangladesh

Organized by: Uttaran and Paani Committee

Description: The consultation workshop will bring together community representatives from eleven river basins in southwest coastal region in Bangladesh to present findings from basin based consultation and develop a regional plan of action for community based river basin management.

Acknowledgement: Centre for Geographical and Environmental Information Services (CEGIS) and Institute of Water Modeling (IWM)

Slowly, Bangladesh shows the world how change is possible

Challenge the assumption that something is impossible – then accept the risks and follow through.

By Keith Lane*, The Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 2009 

DHAKA, BANGLADESH - Roughly 40 percent of Bangladesh’s population lives at or below the poverty line. The odds are stacked against anybody willing to take on the seemingly insurmountable task of trying to help 150 million people move beyond a hand-to-mouth existence.

With so much poverty, pollution, environmental degradation, garbage, corruption, and traffic, it is easy to become suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling of hopelessness. Where to even begin? Cross-border issues such as terrorism, smuggling, and resource extraction only tip the scale further toward feelings of despair.   

Yet what’s happening in Bangladesh is a lesson in how to bring about change to a place where change doesn’t seem possible.

International and national nongovernmental and government aid projects are in place. Money from foreign investors and donors continues to flow into the country. And a look over the past 37 years shows the country has made noticeable progress. To be sure, it is a work in progress.

The districts of Satkira and Khulna are currently experiencing massive annual floods. The flooding is due to a deadly combination of centuries of river management, monsoon rains, and low flood-plain conditions.

Development projects such as the Coastal Embankment Project (CEP) – which Bangladesh took on in the 1960s to create more farmland and protect the southern districts from tidal surges – dried up, dammed, and diverted the rivers. This caused valuable silt, needed to build and maintain the coastline and wetlands, to no longer reach its natural destination. Over time the silt began backing up, causing riverbanks to grow higher and the land to fall lower. Now when the higher riverbanks break they cause colossal months-long flooding.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit one such flooded region in the Satkira district. Some 400,000 people in that region face annual floods that can last up to seven months. It leaves some of Bangladesh’s poorest and most vulnerable without adequate access to water, sanitation, schools, farmland, or proper housing.

As I traveled across the region I saw hundreds of houses ruined, acres of valuable rice land under water or turned into saline ponds for resource-intensive shrimp farms, hundreds of people living in schoolyards, and Hindu and Muslim temples destroyed. Yet there is hope. And that hope is key.

In the middle of it all are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) working to find ways to help their towns, villages, and people. They come together to help raise money, find land for people to live on, and participate in the process with the government aid agencies to help solve the flooding problem.

I walked away from this visit knowing that while there is a long way to go, hope and creativity are closing the chasm of doubt and hopelessness.

Achievements in reducing the flooding situation that use a holistic/indigenous approach such as the Tidal River Management concept are now the hallmark for both national and international NGOs in Bangladesh to follow.

I see a change of perspective taking hold across the country, challenging and radicalizing the way everyone thinks about how to alleviate the flooding and the social justice issues that surround it.

If home-grown CBOs and NGOs, with the support of international aid, can work in such a seemingly hopeless situation, what other solutions are out there to be invested in? What other ways are there to look at the poverty, environment, and corruption problem?

Success lies in how a problem is tackled. These organizations look at an overwhelming, terrible situation and challenge the assumption that it had to always be that way. That simple challenge invites opportunity for focused action.

Of course, such action means taking risks. These pioneers advocating for Bangladesh’s ultrapoor incur abuse from powerful elites, are under constant fear of losing their funding, and are facing an environmental problem that sometimes seems to be getting worse. But there is enough evidence pointing out the way toward success that it is worth the risk. Look no further than the accomplishments of NGO Uttaran in working with the ultrapoor and local government structures in flooded regions during the past 24 years.

Attempting to change the way people think about an issue, and then getting them to act on that new thought process, is often the hardest thing to do. People can spend their whole lives in this endeavor. But, if Bangladesh has proven anything, it’s that even the most challenging problems are surmountable.

*Keith Lane is a specialist in environmental education and non-profit management who recently completed a volunteer placement at Uttaran supported by VSO in Bangladesh.