NGO forum for drinking water supply & sanitation

Abstract

NGO Forum for Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation (DWSS) – one of the biggest national NGOs working on water and sanitation issues. NGO Forum is the apex WatSan body in Bangladesh. It served the poor and unserved people in WatSan sector. It started its journey in Bangladesh with the broad vision of improved public health situation. They try to serve pure drinking water in rural areas and hygienic sanitation system. They are working with several projects on several unserved areas of Bangladesh regarding supply of pure drinking water and sanitation. Thus, they try to mitigate water related diseases and unhygienic causes that leads to death. NGO Forum for DWSS has different cells for its operational activity; NRC is one of its cells. At NRC Cell they maintain available data and information on water and sanitation related issues. Thus conduct several researches on WatSan issues. NRC is a knowledge management centre branding itself as “Centre of Excellence”, in the WatSan sector. It is now involved with diversification of multidimensional services. It conduct internship program as a knowledge sharing program. It also has a enrich library that served as the National Archive for the WatSan sector. They have a database named WatSan database. WatSan database contains all water and sanitation related news, reports, projects, articles, documents, photos, organization information, arsenic map etc. And the online library system is called as Library Information System (LIS). NGO Forum did several projects for mitigation of arsenic, help the rural people to save themselves from arsenic related diseases. These are - “Sustainable Arsenic Mitigation (SAsMit)” and the implemented area was Matlab Upazila of Chandpur District, Bangladesh, “Integrated Community-based Arsenic Mitigation Programme” and the implemented area was100 arsenic affected unions in 34 upazilas of 20 districts under 7 Regions of NGO Forum (Barisal, Comilla, Dhaka, Faridpur, Jessore, Khulna and Rajshahi), “Deployment of Arsenic Removal Technologies (DART)” and the covered area was Darmurhuda and Sarail Upazila. It’s another project for arsenic mitigation was Columbia University Arsenic Mitigation Project (CUAMP) and implemented area is Gopalgonj sadar Upazila and Matlab Upazila of Chandpur district. I have tried to assess whether NGO Forum is able to provide safe drinking water in regions with elevated-arsenic enriched groundwater for rural and disadvantaged community in Bangladesh or not.