Experiences with the management and implementation of drinking water supplies in Bangladesh

Since its discovery, the arsenic calamity has received much attention from the international scientific community. On the other hand little has been achieved in the implementation of sustainable water supplies for the social groups that are most affected by the contamination. In our view, the major obstacle and at the same time the most urgent priority for addressing the issue lies not in technology itself, as several options already exist, but lies in starting a proper technical and institutional implementation process reflecting the priorities of those groups. One of the challenges is to streamline processes with different time constants. Firstly, in order to come up with the best possible solution we must take time to increase our understanding of the social and technical mechanisms of the problem. Moreover, the development of institutional and organisational arrangements at a community level will be a very time consuming process. On the other hand we cannot wait for all the uncertainties to be crystallised but must mitigate the water contamination as soon as possible (Rammelt & Boes 2006). In previous work we suggest an implementation process where short-term interventions ‘trigger’ the necessary room to explore possibilities on the long-term. Subsequently, the knowledge and information from the local people can be included as an essential ‘trigger’ to research more enduring solutions (Rammelt & Boes 2005, 2006). An approach is required linking the necessary scientific knowledge to local knowledge, priorities and activities. It is believed that a joint effort between local development organisations to translate the mitigation agenda into grassroots activities, and the experience of research organisations on a scientific and technical level will be successful. The Arsenic Mitigation and Research Foundation (AMRF) has been set-up as a network structure to include these different participants. We will now present the first steps of a programme that seeks to bring these principles into practice.

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