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BACKGROUND Summary of the Project Urban migration is becoming an increasing issue in Bangladesh’s cities. Climate change induced hazards such as floods and droughts lead people to seek for better livelihood opportunities. Therefore, they migrate from rural areas to urban centres. In Dhaka more than 23,000 people are concentrated on one square kilometre and the city’s population continues to grow by 1,400 people per day. A rapid increase of urban density is found in almost all major districts. Arriving in the cities, the migrants barely find a decent life. Since they are mostly poverty affected they have no other opportunity than moving to urban slums where there is no decent infrastructure. Consequently, the dwellers become highly vulnerable to climate change induced and other disasters in their new home. Slums are considered as illegal settlements and are thus neglected by the cities’ planning authorities and suffer from vast development failure. This is where the project at hand comes in and will contribute to bettering the lives of slum dwellers. The project intervention aims at increasing the capacities of communities in urban areas to adapt to climate change and strengthening their capabilities to avoid, reduce and cope with the impacts of natural and man-made hazards and to reduce related losses and damages (overall objective). Specifically, this intervention will increase the resilience of dwellers in four urban slums in Dhaka and Khulna city in the face of disasters, climate change and socio-economic vulnerabilities (specific objective). The activities will target a total of 26,070 people or 5,250 households in the Lalmath and Bauniabadh slums in Dhaka and in the Labanchara and Masghat slums in Khulna. The project will lead to more disaster aware slum inhabitants, will help establishing a resilient infrastructure, assist in diversifying the livelihoods of the dwellers and lead a dialogue with the relevant governmental stakeholders in order to reach sustainable solutions of the problems the urban poor encounter. The major activities involve elaborating a Risk Reduction Action Plan (RRAP) for each slum in a participatory and community-owned process. To this end, the project will help to create Slum Disaster Management Committees (SDMC). Together with government actors and service providers, these committees will elaborate the action plans that will lead to targeted and needs-driven infrastructure investments and capacity building programs. The project will be implemented by Caritas Bangladesh and Habitat for Humanity International Bangladesh under the supervision of Caritas Switzerland. The project will last for three years, starting on 1st December 2016. To date, there have been very few urban DRR undertakings in Bangladesh. This project aims at contributing to knowledge and visibility creation for all the involved actors and finding the right approach to bettering the lives of the urban poor. If deemed successful, the aim will be to undertake replications in many other slums in the booming urban centres of Bangladesh. |
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