The Project:
UNICEF Bangladesh with the financial assistance from Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) designed the project named as Deployment of Arsenic Removal Technologies (DART) to make the field verification and to evaluate technical performance and social acceptance of different arsenic removal technologies, which have been provisionally approved by the Government of Bangladesh for the use of arsenic affected communities. The technologies are household-based filters like ALCAN, READ-F and SONO and the community-based SIDKO filter. The principal objective of the project is to distribute these filters and assess these technologies for sustainable use by the community people.
NGO Forum is working with UNICEF to implement the DART project activities in two upazilas namely Damurhuda and Sarail under Chuadanga and Brahmanbaria districts. Two unions were selected from each of the upazila as intervention areas on the basis of high arsenic contamination in tubewell water. The following tasks are being performed in the selected unions: social mobilization, technology deployment and monitoring performance of the household and community-based ARTs.
NGO Forum through its 14 regional offices has been working to mitigate the arsenic problem by implementing different projects and programmes since 1997. Within the DART intervention area, each of the 400 households are considered as a unit. Each unit is further divided into 8-10 clusters and each cluster consists of 40-50 households, which in fact depends on the community size. The clusters will serve as the fundamental group for the participatory community planning interventions. The four DART Unions in Damurhuda and Sarail Upazilas contain 27,025 households under 62 units.
Project Implementation Area :
NGO Forum for Drinking Water Supply & Sanitation started the DART project activities in Darmurhuda and Sarail Upazila in September 2006 under the 1st phase and the work continued to May 2007. The activities were further extended up to March 2008. Project Duration : September 2006 – March 2008
Project Objective :
The main objective of the project is to distribute and assess different arsenic removal technologies for sustainable use by the community people.
Project Activities:
■ Social Mobilization
■ Technology Deployment
a) Demand creation of arsenic removal technologies
b) Distributing arsenic removal technologies (household filter) on trial basis
c)
Distribution of household filters as per the demand of the communities
■ Technology Monitoring
a)
Monitoring the performance of technologies and user’s acceptability
b)
Water quality monitoring |
