On a shrinking island in the Meghna estuary, the salt is taking the wells and the harvest, and the women who carry every drop of water have long been kept out of the decisions about it. Here is what changed when we put 60 of them at the centre.
By Ahmed Imtiaz Jami, President, OBHIZATRIK Foundation.
All pictures are courtesy of OBHIZATRIK.
I have spent years working on the coast of Patuakhali, and I have learned to trust what the women of these islands tell me about water. They know it better than anyone. So when I think about CharLata, I do not begin with maps or figures. I begin with a woman on a path at first light, a pitcher against her hip, walking the better part of an hour to bring home water that is fit to drink.
Suma Begum is 28 and has three children. The pond behind her house turned brackish months ago, the colour of weak tea and twice as salty, and so her walk for drinking water grows longer with every dry season. On CharLata this is not one woman's story. It is almost every woman's morning, and often her evening too.
CharLata is a low silt island in Rangabali, at the southern edge of Patuakhali, where the rivers of the Meghna basin run out into the Bay of Bengal. Water lies on every side of it, and still safe water is the rarest thing here. The monsoon is generous. The dry season is hard. The ponds shrink and turn saline, the shallow tubewells slow to a trickle, and families ration what little they have, drinking first and washing last.
Last winter we sat with these households and listened, and then we counted. More than nine in ten families, 90 percent, told us that collecting water is women's work alone. Close to 96 percent named salinity as their worst water problem. Many women give up to four hours of every day to water, fetching it, filtering it, storing it and stretching it.
The salt is not only in the glass. It is in the soil and in the rivers, and the people of CharLata measure it in what they have lost. The fish are fewer than they were even a few years ago, the older fishers told us, and nets that once came back full now come back half empty. The land does not give what it used to give: rice that yielded 50 maund to the acre now yields 30, sometimes 20. Even the deep tubewell, they said, no longer brings up enough water, and not regularly.
Then there is the ash. Almost 97 percent of the households we surveyed said coal ash from the nearby thermal power plant has reached their ponds and open water. They spoke of a grey film on the water they cook with, of children with coughs and rashes, of fish that cannot thrive. The women's hands are in that water all day, so the harm reaches them first.
Disaster makes all of it worse. When a cyclone comes, as one did again last May, it is the women who are sent to secure the family's drinking water. 85 percent told us that duty was theirs. They are the first to respond and the last to be asked. Only 18 percent of them had ever sat in a single meeting about water or disaster preparedness. When we asked why they had never joined a committee, the answers were almost the same from house to house: the housework, the distance, the lack of confidence, and most often of all, "no one ever asked me."
That sentence is the reason for everything we did next. At OBHIZATRIK Foundation we have worked on this coast for more than a decade, on cyclones, on livelihoods, and on the standing of women, Since 2020, we have maintained a permanent branch office on CharLata Island, enabling us to work closely with the community and deliver long-term, locally led development initiatives. With the support of a gender grant under IUCN's Building River Dialogue and Governance (BRIDGE) programme, and with our research partner INDEPTH Limited, we set ourselves a single goal for six months: to put 60 women from CharLata's fishing and farming families at the centre of how their island manages its water.
We began by listening, not by lecturing. There was a household survey, a participatory gender audit, group discussions and long interviews with women and men, fishers and farmers, union members and imams. The women drew maps of their daily walk for water and marked, month by month, when the wells turn to salt. Only then did the training begin. Through April and May, the 60 women moved through four courses, set in an order we chose with care so that confidence would come before technical skill: financial literacy, then leadership, then disaster risk reduction, and finally water management and governance.
They learned to read water by its colour, smell and taste, to keep rainwater clean from the roof to the pitcher, to care for a pond sand filter and a hand tubewell, and to follow a water problem from the household to the village committee, to the Union Parishad, and on to the offices that hold the budgets. Nazma Begum, who is 40 and already works with a local group, was one of them. So was Fatima Jannat Sonchi, 27, who teaches children on the island. They are known by their neighbours and they are willing to speak, and that is exactly what we hoped for.
By May, when the women came together for a validation workshop, they were no longer only naming their troubles. They wrote seven demands of their own, a short charter for safer and fairer water, and they placed it in the hands of local leaders. In June, we shared the findings in public and put up information materials across the island, so that what was learned would stay where it is needed.
I will not pretend that six months mend an island. The salt is still rising, the ash still falls, and no grant can embank a coastline or rewrite a power policy. What I can say is that 60 women now know their rights, their water and their own voices, and that they have taken seats at tables that used to beclosed to them. The work that matters now is making sure those seats outlast us.
Even so, CharLata feels different in small ways. A woman who once sat silent at the back of a meeting now stands to explain, with evidence, why a tubewell must be mended before the dry season. A pond that was no one's responsibility now has a list of names who keep it clean. "We always knew the water best," one of them told me. "Now people are starting to ask us." On an island where the tide has always had the last word, that is a turning worth protecting.
