Safe Drinking Water, Bangladesh

Organization: Social Development Foundation
Project Leaders:
Wahida Huq
Zahurul Alam
Geographic Area: Bangladesh
Link: http://www4.worldbank.org/sprojects/Project.asp?pid=P053578

During the 1970s and 1980s, aid organizations installed thousands of wells in Bangladesh, hoping to halt dysentery and cholera. While this program surpassed its goal of providing "safe" wells to 80 percent of the country's population by 2000, it had a massive blind spot: not testing for naturally occurring arsenic. 20,000 Bangladeshis a year are now dying from related ailments, and up to 30 million more may be affected — a public health disaster on a larger scale than Bhopal or Chernobyl is in the making.

Responding to this crisis in early 2003, the World Bank gave $18.2 million to the Social Development Foundation (SDF), a nonprofit with civil society and government representatives, to support public works including safe drinking water efforts. SDF will use this money to leverage participation from NGOs and financing from the private sector. Communities will share ownership by contributing 15 percent of the necessary costs; SDF and the private sector will take care of the rest. The innovative Foundation is also attaching strings to its contributions to ensure public participation in how these funds are spent. In other words, it's using the power of the purse to bridge sectoral divides and to connect citizens with decision-making processes.

Over the next four years, the project will finance 1,800 small-scale community infrastructure projects. While it's still very early on, SDF seems determined to get the most bang for the buck: addressing problems like arsenic in well water as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Its support of public-private partnerships and of community ownership (of both finances and decisions) appears to be as wise as an umbrella in a monsoon.