Challenges acknowledged but ignorance continued: WASH deprivation of excluded community intensified

Reaching socially and geographically isolated groups is indeed one of the major problems faced by the development community and respective governments. In successive progress reports on MDG (2007 and 2009), the Government of Bangladesh acknowledged that there are poverty pockets where benefits of development are not reaching as per needs. Several study reports published by the statistical division of the government also provided details of the identified districts, sub-districts and areas where coverage is extremely low. However, the allocation of resources by the Government does not show that any importance has been given to the study findings to address such geographical exclusion. A recent WaterAid study suggests that the government has spent over 4 billion taka during the last seven fiscal years through 42 development projects on issues related to sanitation. However, none the projects was targeted to reach any excluded areas. 0.42 per cent of the ADP money over the past 7 fiscal years was spent to provide subsidy to the poor for installation of sanitary toilets, however, another WaterAid study suggests that benefits do not reach to the socially and geographically excluded community. Although the government policy, strategy and subsidy programme on sanitation stress the need of attacking poverty directly to ensure equity, the proposed paper argues that focused programme targeting the excluded communities are extremely important and pro-poor strategy for WASH sector needs to be revised accordingly to achieve MDG goal on sanitation within stipulated time. [authors abstract ]