BWDB Officials Trained on Financial Management, Accounting and Auditing Systems

Management and Training International (MTI) Ltd. conducted the three-day training course on Financial Management, Accounting and Auditing Systems from 18 to 20 August 2026 at the Central ICT Lab, Level-11, Pani Bhaban, BWDB, Dhaka. Twenty-five officials of the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), under the Ministry of Water Resources, took part — the third batch under Package 21 of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project (CSAWM Project), BWDB Part, and the first in the programme on public financial management.

Why a Water Board Trains Its Engineers in Accounts

Most of the public money that passes through the Bangladesh Water Development Board is committed by engineers, not accountants. A Sub-Divisional Engineer certifies a measurement book; an Executive Engineer signs a running bill; a design circle’s estimate becomes the budget line that the Directorate of Finance later has to defend. When the auditors arrive, they are reading decisions that were taken on site and at the drawing board.

That is the logic behind this course, and it shows in who was nominated. Fifteen of the twenty-five participants were serving engineers — three Executive Engineers and twelve Sub-Divisional and Assistant Engineers — sitting alongside five accounts officers, two Deputy Chiefs, a Research Officer and two Senior Assistant Directors from administration. The course treated financial management, accounting and audit as one continuous chain, and put the people who start that chain in the same room as the people who close it.

Three Directors, Three Days

The course design was unusually clean: each day was handed to the BWDB director who owns that subject. The Director of the Directorate of Finance took financial management on Day 1, the Director of the Directorate of Accounts took accounting on Day 2, and the Director of the Directorate of Audit took the auditing system on Day 3. Participants therefore heard each discipline from the office that applies it to the Board’s own books — not from a generic finance trainer.

Course Leadership

Twelve Sessions, One Chain of Accountability

Read in order, the twelve sessions follow a taka from the moment it is planned to the moment it is audited.

Day-by-Day Course Schedule

Participants reported to the Central ICT Lab at 08:30 on the first morning for registration and the pre-evaluation, and at 09:00 on the following two days. Each day ran four sessions and closed at 16:00.

Training Methodology

The Central ICT Lab gives every participant a workstation, and the course used it: statement analysis, cost exercises and the accounting-software session were worked on screen rather than described. Each session combined a short presentation with a demonstration, a case or a group exercise, and the closing day’s audit sessions leaned on worked examples from the kind of records BWDB offices actually keep.

Group Work & Presentations

Participants worked in groups named after Bangladesh’s rivers — the Sitalakhya and Surma groups among them — and presented the results of their exercises back to the class. For a cohort split between engineers and accounts staff, the mixed groups were the point: an Assistant Engineer from a design circle and a Senior Account Assistant from the Directorate of Finance working the same budget or variance problem see different things in it.

Who Was in the Room

The cohort was drawn from fourteen offices, most of them at Pani Bhaban and the Board’s Dhaka headquarters — four participants each from Design Circle-9 and the Directorate of Planning-3, three from the Office of the Chief Engineer, Monitoring, and others from the Directorates of Programme, Finance, Accounts, Personnel, Welfare and Economic Evaluation, the Hydroinformatics & Flood Forecasting Circle and the ICZ and Climate Change Management office. Two came in from the field: the Northern Hydrology Measurement Division in Pabna and the Narsingdi Water Development Division.

Full Participant Roster

Closing & Certification

The course closed on the afternoon of 20 August 2026 with the post-evaluation, the participants’ course evaluation and the distribution of certificates by the Project Director and the course management team.

The Course in Pictures

Twelve further photographs from the three days at the Central ICT Lab, Pani Bhaban.

Why This Matters

A water development project in Bangladesh can be technically sound and still fail an audit — because an estimate was not tied to a budget head, a variance was not explained, or a register was not kept the way the rules require. Those failures are rarely fraud. More often, the engineer who made the decision and the accountant who recorded it were working from different pictures of the same money.

Under the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project, where government and development-partner funds sit side by side and reporting obligations are strict, that gap is expensive. A course that walks engineers through finance, accounting and audit in the same order the money moves, taught by the three directors who hold those functions for the Board, narrows the gap from both ends.

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