1986
The year we arrived
A small team, a rented office and a country with one of the highest rates of diarrhoeal disease in the world.
0.0 million
people reached with clean water
0.0 million
people reached with decent toilets
0
years working in Bangladesh
0
countries now use the sanitation model Bangladesh helped pioneer
And still, 75.4 million people in Bangladesh — around 45% of the country — do not have an adequate toilet. We are proud of forty years. We are not finished.
OUR STORY
It started with a hand pump and a conversation.
We arrived in Bangladesh in 1986. What we learned here — that communities lead their own change — went on to reshape sanitation across the world.
Read the full storyMILESTONE
Six things forty years bought us.
3.7 million people reached with clean water
Hand pumps, piped schemes, pond sand filters and rainwater harvesting — whatever the ground and the weather allowed.
9.7 million people reached with decent toilets
From the first household latrines to city-scale sanitation planning with municipal governments.
A Bangladeshi idea exported to 60 countries
Community-Led Total Sanitation began here with VERC and is now practised across the world.
Legal water connections in slum communities
Not informal taps but registered, metered, lawful connections — and the tenure security that comes with them.
Water and toilets in tea garden communities
Working with some of the most marginalised families in Bangladesh, in gardens long left off the national map.
Faecal sludge turned into compost
Innovation in faecal sludge management, including a co-compost plant with BASA in Shakhipur municipality.
WATCH CHAMPIONING WASH
Forty years in four minutes.
Archive footage, community voices and the people who have carried this work since 1986.
Captions in English and Bangla. Audio description available.
All films and photos40 STORIES FOR 40 YEARS
One story for every year we have been here.
Story 8 of 40 · a new story every fortnight
WISH CARDS
Notes from the people who built this.
Testing in the deployed site
Md. Rofi Uddin Rafi
YP ICT, WaterAid
It is good nice wish dekhi to ki hoy
Swadesh
ICT Officer, Wateraid
