Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

BRAC aims at eliminating poverty through multi-dimensional programmes with holistic approaches in some of the Asian and African countries. To help realise the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), BRAC implementing water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programme since 2006, reaching some 66.4 million people across half of Bangladesh. Financial support came from Dutch government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government. The objective of this paper is to describe which areas were adapted for mainstreaming gender approaches and ensuring equity of services. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from primary and secondary sources, validity cross-checked through triangulation. Findings show that gender mainstreaming as a cross-cutting strategy helps women and other disadvantaged groups, notably poor and ultra-poor households, to become aware of, and increase their access to services and decision-making processes for equal benefits. The programme constituted 30% (873) regular female staff and 100% (5,089) project-based staff overall three quarters of the teams working on implementation were female. At community level, more than 65,000 Village WASH Committees (VWC) were formed using participatory methods. Just over half of the VWC members were female, which reflected gender-balance in decision-making power. In the beginning, organising meeting together with men and women at community level were so tough, women were not allowed to attain such type of sessions in front of male. So, the programme staff were bound to hang a screen (porda) in between male and female member in some religiously rigid areas. The women participation most of the cases remained silent in decision making. Sometime women spoke more but male member did not consider what she says. It was a tradition that irruption and shouting - no matter whether the opinions were differ than men’s decision. The programme trained 18,500 religious leaders and 43,300 students, teacher and developed gender and equity operational guideline as well as provided gender training to 4,000 staff to sensitise on WASH issues.

Separate latrines with menstrual hygiene facilities were constructed for girls in over 5,200 schools and formed student brigades with equal numbers of boys and girls in each school. More than 43 million cluster meetings were conducted for men, women, adolescents and children to raise awareness of hygiene and sanitation. About 11.6 million non-poor and 1 million poor were mobilised to build sanitary latrines with their own resources and 5.9 million ultra-poor people got grants for latrine construction.

The integrated monitoring systems of WASH makes it possible to measure raising voice of vulnerable groups and report on gender- and equity-specific changes in sanitation and hygiene habits. In 2006, hygienic latrine access in the programme areas was 31.5%,  similar to the national figure of 31.9%. In 2014 it was 84% in phase one areas where national figure was 61%. However poor, ultra-poor, disabled persons, and hard-to-reach areas are still underserved. The affordability and involvement in decision making of vulnerable groups are big challenges which need to be addressed, while this lessons could be useful for other developing countries.