Two women using one of Practical Action's tube wells in Bangladesh.
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Authors
Mehrab ul Goni
Issue Date
30/01/2015
Type
Language
en
Keywords
Disasters , Water and Sanitation
Alternative Title
Abstract
Practical Action is interested in reducing the risk of disasters, and reducing people’s vulnerability to disasters. Sometimes these interventions can be relatively simple. For example in Bangladesh, 110,000 people each year die from diarrhoeal diseases – largely as a result of contaminated water. Although the availability of tube wells is improving rapidly, sometimes, when they are built, allowance has not been made for flood waters. The tubewells therefore get inundated when the monsoon comes. Safe drinking water goes into short supply. Through our Disaster Risk Reduction work Practical Action has worked with the community to provide 60 tube wells on raised platforms. Each one is more than two feet higher than the previous highest flood. One beneficiary, Moina Begum said “Our life was very painful due to a lack of safe drinking water; particularly during floods. While the flood is ongoing we were fetching safe drinking water from one or two kilometres distance. Some times we even used flood water to meet our needs. Every year we suffered diseases like dysentery and diarrhoea. However, now we can permanently overcome these problems because Practical Action has installed a community based elevated tube well near my house. 60-70 families collected water every day as this tube well did not go under flood water this year. Now we are all very happy because we are no longer at risk from drinking contaminated water."
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