S A S M I T
ACCESS TO ARSENIC-SAFE WATER

To provide community driven option for safe water as arsenic mitigation option, assessment of hydrogeological suitability as well as social conditions are being evaluated with emphasize on the distribution of hardcore poor people and access to as-safe water. Such assessments would be very much useful for optimizing the location for installation of safe water tubewells considering sustainability of water supply and social need.

Two important activities of this component – identifying hardcore poor households and access to As-safe water has been assessed based on all available data and village level social consultation. These data were distributed into mauza maps for obtaining the pattern of distribution. For hardcore poor, information was collected from BRAC-WASH (Matlab North) and IIRD-MIDP (mainly Matlab South) which represent 2007 condition.

  • Assessment of access to As-safe water
  • Identify Hardcore Poor


Assessment on access to As-safe water in Matlab

For assessment of access to As-safe water, all available data from all the relevant agencies working in Matlab were collected and analyzed.

Identify Hardcore Poor

Hardcore poor household numbers were collected from BRAC-WASH and MIDP. In the recent time (2007) they have conducted door-to-door survey and collected information on a number of demographic and social parameters. For South, data was collected from MIDP/IIRD and available data covered 76% villages of the thana. Both BRAC and MIDP identified hardcore poor households using the criteria set by the government.

Prioritization of individual Villages:

We have considered three factors in determining the priority level of individual villages which are-

  • a) Percentage of hard core poor people
  • b) Access to safe water
  • c) Level of arsenic contamination

SASMIT Social Mapping

To obtain more detailed picture of the villages related to hardcore HH and access to As-safe tubewell, detailed village consultation has been done in 35 villages in the late part of 2009. The villages were selected based on the analysis of the results available from ASMAT survey. All these villages belong to Matlab South Thana.

Priority was given to those villages which have less access to As-safe water. During this consultation process, all relevant demographic data were collected and then plotted onto a hand-sketch map.