We came to build wells. We stayed to change a system.
Bangladesh in the mid-1980s had one of the highest rates of diarrhoeal disease in the world, and a groundwater story nobody yet fully understood. WaterAid opened here in 1986 with a small team and a simple belief: that clean water, a decent toilet and good hygiene are rights, not gifts. Forty years on, that belief has shaped everything we have done — and one idea born in a Bangladeshi village has travelled to around sixty countries.
Community-Led Total Sanitation
Working with the Village Education Resource Centre, our teams stopped counting latrines and started asking a different question: what does the community itself want to do about open defecation?
The answer — collective, self-driven, and often faster than anything a project plan could deliver — became Community-Led Total Sanitation. It is now practised in around sixty countries. It is Bangladesh’s single largest contribution to global sanitation.
Drag to travel forty years.
In 1986 we were asked how many wells we would dig. Forty years later the better question is how many communities no longer need to ask us anything.
Long-serving colleague, WaterAid Bangladesh · attribution to be confirmed