BWDB Officials Trained on Participatory Water Management Rules 2014 for Sustainable Water Management Organisations

Management and Training International (MTI) Ltd. conducted the three-day training course on the Participatory Water Management Rules 2014, focusing on sustainable Water Management Organisations (WMOs), from 19 to 21 July 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 second batch under Package 21 of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project (CSAWM Project), BWDB Part.

The Problem This Course Exists to Solve

Bangladesh built its participatory water management framework on a simple premise: the people who farm inside a polder, fish in a beel or depend on an irrigation canal will look after the infrastructure better than a distant agency can. The Participatory Water Management Rules 2014 gave that premise legal form — a route for water users to organise into registered Water Management Organisations with defined powers, responsibilities and a formal relationship to the Board.

The recurring difficulty is not formation. It is survival. A WMO is comparatively easy to constitute while a project is running and support is flowing; the hard part is keeping it solvent, governed and trusted after the project office closes. That is the gap this course was designed around — which is why its three days moved deliberately from rules and structure (Day 1) to community development and money (Day 2) to conflict, obstacles and measurement (Day 3).

Inauguration & Course Leadership

Pijush Krishna Kundu, Additional Chief Engineer (Civil) and Project Director of the CSAWM Project (BWDB Part), opened the course, led the first substantive session on the concept and features of participatory water management, returned on the final afternoon to chair the course review, and closed the programme. Having the Project Director both open the course and personally deliver Session 1 set the tone: participatory water management was framed as a delivery obligation of the Board, not a community-relations exercise bolted onto engineering work.

Resource Persons

Five senior BWDB professionals delivered the twelve sessions. Between them they covered the policy end (Project Director), the extension and community-development end (two Deputy Chief Extension Officers), and the water-management and evaluation end (the Chief Water Management, PRL) — so participants heard the same framework described from the office that writes the rules, the office that applies them in the field, and the office that later has to assess whether they worked.

Six Building Blocks of a Sustainable WMO

Read across the three days, the curriculum assembles a WMO from the ground up — each block useless without the ones beneath it.

Day-by-Day Course Schedule

The course ran four sessions a day, from a 09:00 start to a 16:00 close, with participants reporting to the Central ICT Lab at 08:30 each morning.

Training Methodology

No session on the schedule was a lecture alone. Every one of the twelve paired its technical content with an interactive method, and three of them — conflict resolution, challenges and solutions, and monitoring and evaluation — used story telling, which is the honest instrument for this subject: participatory water management fails and succeeds in specific villages, over specific disputes, and those cases transfer better as narrative than as bullet points.

Group Presentations & Course Review

The final afternoon belonged to the participants. Working in groups, they reconstructed the three days themselves — presenting back the key learnings from each day to the Project Director and their peers. The screens carried the groups' own syntheses, including a worked conflict resolution process distilled from the Day 3 session. It is a deceptively demanding format: a group that has not genuinely followed the material cannot summarise it in front of the officer who taught it.

Who Was in the Room — and Why the Mix Matters

The most telling feature of this cohort is where it came from. Nine of the twenty-five participants work in BWDB's finance, audit and accounts functions — the Directorate of Finance, the Directorate of Audit, the Directorate of Accountant and the Green Road Regional Accounting Centre. On a course whose central problem is keeping community organisations solvent, the Board put its money people in the room alongside its engineers and extension officers rather than sending community-development staff alone.

Around them sat three Deputy Chiefs from sociology, agriculture and extension, two research officers, six civil and mechanical engineers from the design circles and field divisions, and officers from Training, Personnel, Ground Water Processing and the B-Strong project — seventeen distinct directorates and offices in total, from Dhaka headquarters out to Rajbari and Gopalganj.

Full Participant Roster

Closing Ceremony & Certification

The Project Director closed the course on the afternoon of 21 July 2026 and distributed certificates to the participants. The closing followed directly from the group review session, so the certificates were handed over against work the cohort had just presented rather than against attendance alone.

The Course in Pictures

Sixteen further photographs from the three days at the Central ICT Lab, Pani Bhaban — the opening introductions, the lecture and group-work sessions, the Day 3 group presentations and the certificate ceremony.

Why This Matters

Every polder, regulator and irrigation canal BWDB builds is handed, sooner or later, to people who did not design it. Whether that handover holds depends on an organisation that has to elect leaders, keep books, collect contributions, settle disputes between upstream and downstream users, and still be functioning in a decade. The Participatory Water Management Rules 2014 describe what that organisation should look like. They cannot, by themselves, make one durable.

What makes this course consequential is that it treated WMO sustainability as an institutional and financial problem rather than a social one, and staffed the room accordingly. When an Assistant Director from the Directorate of Audit and a Sub-Divisional Engineer from Rajbari work through the same session on revenue generation and fund management, the resulting scheme design is likelier to include a WMO that can actually pay for its own operation and maintenance. Under the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project, that durability is the entire point: climate adaptation in the delta is delivered by community institutions that outlast the projects which created them.

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