Healthy Village Urban brings the Healthy Village model into Bangladesh’s crowded urban settlements, tackling disease and stunting through integrated water, sanitation, nutrition and maternal health, and making sure children with disabilities are included.

In Bangladesh’s dense urban settlements, families, many of them migrants, live with unreliable sanitation, limited safe water and thin maternal and child health services. Children under two, pregnant and lactating women, and adolescent girls carry the greatest risk, and extreme flooding repeatedly damages the very facilities households have invested in.

Child health in these settlements depends on several systems working together at once, water, sanitation, nutrition and health care. Addressing any one alone leaves the others to undo the gains. Children with disabilities, often overlooked entirely, need to be part of the response from the start.

24%

of children under five are affected by stunting

nationally, B-MICS 2025

Migrant families

Among those most exposed in urban settlements, and often the least connected to services.

Repeated flooding

Damages the latrines and handwashing devices families have just invested in themselves.

Healthy Village Urban mobilises whole communities around child health, integrating water, sanitation and hygiene with nutrition and care for mothers and children. Growth monitoring triggers behaviour change; local champions guide their neighbours; entrepreneurs supply the products families need; and community institutions and local government are engaged throughout.

Growth monitoring that changes behaviour

Regularly measuring children under five in courtyard settings makes growth visible to families and prompts practical change, better hygiene, feeding and care during the critical first 1,000 days.

Sanitation and hygiene

Households adopt improved latrines and handwashing devices, and the programme rebuilds after floods so hard-won gains are not lost, a persistent challenge in these settlements.

Disability inclusion

Children with disabilities are actively identified and supported rather than left out, making inclusion a designed feature of the model rather than an afterthought.

Schools and adolescent health

Schoolchildren and adolescents are reached with nutrition, WASH and menstrual health and hygiene, extending the programme’s reach to the next generation of parents.

Community health work in an urban settlement, Bangladesh.

These are 2025 figures from the urban programme. Over its life, the model has already shown deeper change: stunting among children under two has fallen by around half in programme areas, and improved-latrine access has risen from a 17% baseline to well over 90%.

156

Healthy Villages declared

by local government

17,926

children under five monitored

for growth

465

children with disabilities

identified and supported

93%

now have an improved latrine

up from a 17% baseline

The model lives through people, the mothers, entrepreneurs and community champions making health the everyday norm.