Second PWMR Batch: BWDB Officials Trained on Participatory Water Management Rules 2014 for Sustainable WMOs

Management and Training International (MTI) Ltd. conducted the second running of the three-day course on the Participatory Water Management Rules 2014, with a focus on sustainable Water Management Organisations (WMOs), from 20 to 22 September 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 sixth batch under Package 21 of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project (CSAWM Project), BWDB Part.

Rivers on the Screen

The first PWMR batch in July framed sustainability of Water Management Organisations as a financial and institutional problem. This second running kept the module and made it local. Participants were organised into teams named after Bangladesh’s rivers, and the teams brought those rivers into the room: the Chengi River team — a Deputy Chief (Agriculture), an Assistant Chief (Soil), an Assistant Engineer and a Senior Accounts Assistant — presented techniques for effective community engagement, and another group built a stakeholder map of the Halda River as a shared system, with BWDB, fisheries interests and local users around a common resource.

That is the honest way to teach the PWM Rules 2014. The rules describe a structure; whether it works depends on a specific river, its specific users and the disputes between them. The three days moved from the rules and their history (Day 1), to communities, networks and money (Day 2), to conflict, challenges and measurement (Day 3).

Resource Persons

Seven senior professionals delivered the twelve sessions. The Project Director opened with the concept of participatory water management; the Board’s Chief Water Management (PRL) took the legal framework and monitoring; four Deputy Chief Extension Officers — including Md. Abdul Matin, who came in from the Kushtia office to teach WMO governance and financial sustainability — carried the community and institutional sessions; and the CSAWM Project’s Superintending Engineer chaired the closing review.

Course Leadership

Six Building Blocks of a Sustainable WMO

Day-by-Day Course Schedule

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

Training Methodology

Every session paired its content with an interactive method. Three of the Day 3 sessions used story telling — the right instrument for a subject that succeeds or fails in particular villages over particular disputes — and the course closed with river-named groups presenting to a review panel.

Group Presentations & Course Review

On the final afternoon the river-named teams presented their syntheses to a review panel led by the CSAWM Project’s Superintending Engineer, with the Project Director and course management at the dais. Topics ranged from community engagement techniques to the Halda conflict map and the performance indicators by which a WMO should be judged.

Who Was in the Room

As in the first PWMR batch, BWDB put its money people in the room. Nine of the twenty-five participants came from accounts — an Assistant Director (Accounts), two Assistant Accountants and six Senior Accounts Assistants from the Directorate of Accounts, the Central RAC and divisional offices. Around them sat ten engineers, two Deputy Chiefs (Agriculture and EF&A), an Assistant Chief (Soil), a Research Officer, an Assistant Director (Admin) and a Sub-Assistant Engineer. Five participants came from field offices in Narsingdi, Mymensingh, Nawabganj, Narayanganj and Gazipur; twenty-two offices were represented in all.

Full Participant Roster

Closing Ceremony & Certification

The Project Director closed the course on the afternoon of 22 September 2026. After the post-evaluation and the participants’ course evaluation, certificates were presented at the dais.

The Course in Pictures

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

Why This Matters

A Water Management Organisation is where a BWDB scheme meets the people who will live with it. The PWM Rules 2014 give that organisation legal form, but they cannot settle a dispute between upstream and downstream users, keep the books balanced or persuade a farmer to pay a maintenance fee. People do those things — and they do them better when the engineers, extension officers and accountants who support them share a working picture of what a sustainable WMO looks like.

This second batch built that picture around real rivers, with a cohort in which accounts staff sat alongside engineers and soil and agriculture specialists. Under the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project, where climate adaptation is delivered through community institutions that must outlast the project, that shared picture is the point of the training.

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