Building Water Business turns safe water and sanitation into a working market, supporting local entrepreneurs in the southwest coastal districts of Bangladesh to build and sell the latrines, handwashing devices and services that families want, and will pay for.
In the flood-prone districts of southwest Bangladesh, unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene keep diarrhoeal disease common and hold back children’s growth. Many households want better latrines, handwashing basins and clean water, but the local supply of quality products, and the finance to buy them, has been missing.
Where services are handed out for free, they tend to disappear when the funding does. The more durable question is whether a real market can meet this need: entrepreneurs who can supply and maintain WASH products at a fair price, and households willing to invest in them.
Building Water Business works on three fronts at once: a stronger private sector, integrated awareness and demand, and a supportive government and community environment. Local entrepreneurs build and sell latrines, handwashing basins and women’s bathing chambers; health-promotion agents sell hygiene and nutrition products on commission; and a cadre of sweepers empties pit latrines as a paid service.
The programme is really a story of local businesspeople, the entrepreneurs, agents and sweepers turning sanitation and clean water into livelihoods.
Building Water Business works with a network of Bangladeshi implementing organisations and the Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE), and sits within Max Foundation’s wider Healthy Village work in the country.
