Bangladesh

It makes sense to centralize our work in Dhaka, the capitol city: 4,000 slum neighborhoods with 3.5 million residents justify our attention. As the second fastest-growing city on the planet—as well as the 9th largest country by population—the term “urban growth” takes on entirely new meaning. If scale can be proven in the poorest communities of Dhaka, it can be replicated in other cities across Bangladesh, South Asia, and various other parts of the world.

What are we doing?

Splash launched a pilot aimed to leverage the vast resources, expertise, and social capital of one of the world's leading WASH organizations through a multi-year partnership. During this time, filtration systems, handwashing stations, drinking water stations were installed and toilets were built and refurbished. We implemented behavior change initiatives like soap drives, child cabinets, and teacher training. In all, 71 schools were served.

This partnership was an effort to show this program could be scaled in Dhaka. However, the pilot didn’t continue after the first year due to a decrease in funding for WASH initiatives.

We still believe Bangladesh is a high priority country for Splash’s brand of work. There are many local organizations that Splash could work with to build their capacity and launch WASH in Schools programs nationally. We are exploring options to achieve this.

What did we learn?

Our ultimate goal is still to share internal knowledge, networks, tech transfer, design, and monitoring and evaluation, such that an existing organization can take the Splash model to scale and Splash can exit strategically. For future relationships, we must ensure we have a clear monitoring, learning, and evaluation system in place and an ongoing focus on supporting the transition from direct to indirect service. In the end, if our work is about real scale and sustainability, then allowing our core models to be implemented by local organizations only makes sense.

Impact

Learn more about Splash's impact here.