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