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Empowering communities to deliver solutions

Climate change had turned disease-free drinking water into a valuable commodity beyond the reach of many impoverished residents of Sutarkhali, in southern Bangladesh. That was until a new scheme developed with grants obtained through Local Climate Adaptive Living facility, or LoCAL, enabled the local government to draft plans for the construction of a water filtration plant.

Rising sea levels combined with extreme and unpredictable flooding have made traditional water sources too salty to drink in this low-lying delta, which borders the dense mangroves of the Sundarbans Wetland and home of the Bengal Tiger. At the same time, incomes from agriculture have dropped along with production levels as farmers struggle to wrestle crops from the salt-water drenched lands.

“I have three children at home,” said Madhobi Mondol who is 35. “I don’t have capability to collect rainwater and I had to depend on the pond for water,” she explained, even though she knew that every sip of water taken from the salty and disease-ridden ponds risked carrying potentially fatal diseases like diarrhea, cholera and typhoid.

LoCAL is a global mechanism that directs resources to local governments and supports them in identifying and acting on locally identified needs. In Sutarkhali, this meant that the ‘union parishad’ or grassroots level local government was able to express residents’ frustration at not being able to access clean drinking water, and most importantly, secure a solution.

In Bangladesh, the LoCAL mechanism has been embraced as part of the Local Government Initiative on Climate change, known briefly as LoGIC. The LoGIC project is funded by the Swedish Development agency Sida and the European Union, with some input from UNDP and UNCDF, uses LoCAL’s innovative system of Performance Based Resilience Grants to channel additional resources to local governments and support their locally identified projects with technical support and capacity building.

A Performance Based Climate Resilience Grant of around US$ 17,000 paid for the construction of a reverse osmosis plant, or water purification system. The scheme provides free water to the poorest members of the community and charges 0.006 US cents a liter to those who can afford it. Monies earned in this way will be used to maintain the plant.

Today, some 8,000 people or 2,000 families are now drinking clean, safe water locally known as “sweet water”. Villagers feel that at long last, their voices have been heard.

“We have been casting votes for many years now, but never got water as we wanted,” said 45-year old Rahima, as she filled up flagons of sweet water at the water filtration plant. “Had this been done earlier, we would have suffered a lot less.”

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