Building Resilience of Urban Slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh

This paper is derived from a pilot project implemented by Habitat for Humanity during 2012-2013, where the author was a technical advisor. Rapid urbanisation and the growth of slums in developing countries such as Bangladesh has led to slum upgrading as an approach to address the problems of the urban poor. The project here was in essence such a slum upgrading project, targeted at an urban slum settlement called Talab Camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the residents comprised an ethnic Bihari community. Dhaka is a rapidly urbanising megacity in one of the world's most densely populated and poorest countries, where almost 30% of its more than 14 million population lives in slums and faces the impacts of a range of hazards, hence the need for building resilience. The project began with a study of this urban context to identify the challenges and opportunities for building resilience in slums there, followed by a sequence of inter-related activities. This consisted of provision of training to local professionals on concepts and applications of Urban Resilience and toolkits for Risk Assessment and Action Planning; a Community Based Participatory Risk Assessment (CBPRA) to identify the inter-related hazards and vulnerabilities affecting Talab Camp, supplemented by a survey of city level institutional actors; and a set of pilot activities guided by the above and Community Action Planning (CAP) workshops, together with community capacity building and developing community organisations. Three main risks were prioritised for addressing in the pilot activities – inadequate drainage, inadequate waste disposal and poor sanitation, and thereby focused on WaSH (drainage, community toilets, water supply, and water purification), solid waste management (household and community level waste collection and disposal), housing improvement (plinth-raising above flood level) and awareness raising (cleaning event and billboards). The pilot activities also included extensive training and capacity building activities. A long-term Community Development Plan (CDP) was also developed in parallel to the pilot activities. The project faced a number of challenges in terms of local expectations, capacity building, and working in a megacity like Dhaka. A number of key lessons were learnt including the time required for adequate community consultation and participation, and unpredictability of political circumstances, in addition to a set of other lessons that can inform future such projects.