BWDB Officials Trained on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management — IWRM, GIS/IoT and Climate-Resilient Irrigation

Management and Training International (MTI) Ltd. conducted the three-day training course on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management (CSAWM) — focusing on IWRM, GIS/IoT applications, climate-resilient irrigation and sustainable agriculture practices from 26 to 28 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 fourth batch of Package 22 of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project (CSAWM Project), BWDB Part, and the sixth course delivered in the programme.

The Course That Names the Project

Every batch so far has been a component of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project. This one is the project — the course that carries its full title, and the one that finally assembles the three things the name promises.

The arc across three days is unusually wide. Day 1 works at basin scale: integration across sectors, catchment analysis, allocation planning, inflow–outflow water accounting, aquifer sustainability, flood and drought response, environmental flow. Day 2 drops to the instrument layer: satellite imagery and change detection, watershed delineation and runoff simulation, sensor networks, telemetry, soil-moisture sensing and automated irrigation control, flood hazard zonation and early warning. Day 3 lands in the field: drip and sprinkler technique, crop-water requirement, drainage design against waterlogging, salinity control, conjunctive surface–groundwater use, crop diversification, resilient varieties, nutrient management and nature-based solutions.

Basin allocation to soil-moisture sensor to fertiliser balance, in seventy-two hours. No other course in the programme spans that range — and none of it makes sense in isolation, which is the point.

Where the Two Halves of CSAWMP Meet

The Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project is implemented in two halves: a BWDB Part under the Ministry of Water Resources, and a DAE Part under the Department of Agricultural Extension. Until this batch, every resource person had come from the water side.

Day 3 changed that. Engr. Mofazzal Hossain, Agricultural Engineer of CSAWMP (DAE Part), taught climate-resilient irrigation; Khandakar Mohammad Rashed Iftekher, Project Director of CSAWMP (DAE Part), taught sustainable agriculture practices. The counterpart project director came to Pani Bhaban to teach the Board's engineers what happens to the water after it leaves their infrastructure.

That is not a scheduling convenience. A polder is built to protect a cropping calendar; an irrigation canal exists to meet a crop-water requirement. When the agency that manages the water and the agency that advises the farmer are trained in the same room by each other, the seam between them — historically where climate adaptation projects lose their benefits — gets a little narrower.

Resource Persons

Five resource persons across the three days, each holding a full day or a defined half.

Course Leadership

The programme's rotating core team continues. A. Z. M. Ridwan returns as Course Coordinator, and Md. Mohsin Patwary — who attended the Package 22 Project Management batch as a participant two weeks earlier — is Course Evaluator here. Trainee to evaluator inside a fortnight is a first for the series.

Twelve Blocks, Three Scales

Each session pairs two sub-topics. Read down the column, the course descends from the basin to the sensor to the soil.

Day-by-Day Course Schedule

Participants reported to the Central ICT Lab at 08:30 each morning, with four sessions a day running to a 16:00 close.

Training Methodology

Three days, three distinct teaching registers. Day 1 ran on case-based learning in the Bangladesh context, group problem-solving and expert sessions. Day 2 was explicitly hands-on technical — the reason the course sat in a working computer lab rather than a seminar room. Day 3 leaned on story telling and VIPP card work, which is the right instrument for agronomy: a salinity problem is a place, a season and a farmer's decision before it is a principle.

Group Poster Presentations

Participants worked in groups across the three days and presented their analysis on flip-chart posters — hand-drawn catchment sketches, printed site photographs, tabulated allocation figures and VIPP cards, defended to the room. It is the most visible evidence in the photographic record that this was analytical work rather than attendance: a group cannot draw a watershed and tabulate its demand figures without having done the exercise.

Participant Feedback

Feedback was taken from the floor on the final afternoon — on the pacing across three quite different technical registers, on the hands-on GIS content, and on how directly the agriculture day connected to the schemes participants supervise.

Who Was in the Room

Fifteen of the twenty-five were engineers — two Executive Engineers, five Sub-Divisional Engineers, seven Assistant Engineers and a Sub-Assistant Engineer — but the notable thing is how deliberately non-uniform the rest of the room was. Alongside them sat four finance and accounts officers, two assistant extension officers from Natore and Rangpur, two research officers in sociology and in environment & forest, and two assistant chiefs in sociology.

For a course whose third day is about farmers' cropping decisions, having sociologists and field extension officers in the room is not decoration. The offices represented reach across the Board's technical spine — the Central GIS Directorate, the Surface Water Hydrology Circle, the North Eastern Hydrology Measurement Division, Design Circle-5, the Directorates of Planning-2 and Planning-3 — and out to WD divisions and circles in Thakurgaon, Chandpur, Dhaka, Natore and Rangpur. Twenty directorates, circles, divisions and projects in all.

Full Participant Roster

Closing Ceremony & Certification

The Project Director led the course review on the final afternoon, participants sat the post-evaluation against their Day 1 baseline, and certificates were distributed to all twenty-five.

The Course in Pictures

Twelve further photographs from the three days at the Central ICT Lab, Pani Bhaban — technical sessions, group poster presentations and the certificate ceremony.

Why This Matters

"Climate-smart" is one of those phrases that can mean everything and therefore nothing. This course gives it a testable definition: it is what happens when the person allocating water in a basin, the person reading the satellite imagery, and the person advising the farmer on which variety to plant are working from the same picture.

Each of those three currently sits in a different institutional world. Basin allocation is BWDB planning; remote sensing and telemetry are increasingly a data-directorate speciality; cropping advice belongs to the Department of Agricultural Extension. A polder that holds back salinity is worth nothing if the cropping calendar behind it does not change; a soil-moisture sensor is an expensive ornament if nobody adjusts the irrigation schedule it reports on; a drought plan written without agronomy is a document about water, not about food.

Putting all three in one room over three days — and having the last day taught by the counterpart project director from the agriculture side — is the most direct expression yet of what the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project is for. Across the remaining batches of Packages 21 and 22, it is the model worth repeating.

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