In Bangladesh, almost 60 million residents live in urban areas. This large number of population can play a major role in achieving SDG sanitation agenda. Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) Bangladesh has a strong working tie with different city corporations to accelerate the FSM services in the respective cities. As part of the process, WSUP is committed to support capacity building of the City Corporations through a package of trainings and followed by preparing citywide FSM plan. ITN-BUET is the national level capacity building agency in the WASH sector that bridges between theory and practice. Recently, WSUP and ITN-BUET have jointly organized a 3 day-long training program on Fecal Sludge Management: An Element of City Wide Inclusive Sanitation for the officials of different city corporations during 26-28 January, 2020.
The major objectives of this training program were to share details on different components of FSM and CWIS, enable the city corporation officials to prepare a ‘FSM Action Plan’ for concerned cities and evaluate the training in order to identify gaps for comprehensive training events in future.
In the Inaugural Session Mr. Habibur Rahman, Sanitation Lead, WSUP expected that the participants will implement the knowledge gained from the training during designing CWIS in their cities. Prof. Dr. Muhammad Ashraf Ali, Director, ITN-BUET said that ITN-BUET will continue to support any efforts regarding the capacity building on FSM & CWIS for practitioners in Bangladesh.
Total 22 participants from Narayanganj, Chattogram and Rangpur city corporations and WSUP participated in the training event. Dr. Md. Mujibur Rahman, Professor, University of Asia Pacific was present at the training and delivered his valuable speech. He motivated the participants to implement their experience and knowledge gained from the training in their workplaces. He hoped that city corporations will play vital role to achieve SDG sanitation agenda by 2030 in the country.
In the closing ceremony Mr. Abdus Shaheen, Country Program Manager, WSUP hoped that the training program worked as a learning event for the city corporations. Mr. Alauddin Ahmed, Project Manager, ITN-BUET implied that the training course was designed differently as it was a two-way communicative training course. He said that this event will be successful if the participants can apply the learnings practically. The participants recommended to show some good examples and create a common network for city corporation officials to make the training outcome successful in the long run.
