Sustainable Urban Water and Sanitation – Khulna, is a web-based knowledge hub, initiated by ‘SUWAS 2018A Bangladesh Team’and getting updated by ‘SUWAS 2019A Bangladesh Team’. The SUWAS (Sustainable Urban Water and Sanitation) 2018A and 2019A Bangladesh teams are formed by the participants from Khulna who took part in the 12 month long International Training Programme on “Sustainable Urban Water & Sanitation-Integrated Process” (ITP-SUWAS), jointly organized by NIRAS Sweden & Water Aid on behalf of Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) held in Sweden & Cambodia in 2018 (SUWAS 2018ABangladesh Team) and Sweden & Nepal in 2019 (SUWAS 2019A Bangladesh Team) respectively. ITP-SUWAS contributes knowledge and skills to build up the participants’ capacities towardsensuring sustainable water supply and sanitation system at city-level in the participating countries. In Khulna city, inefficient and inequitable water & sanitation and environmentally unsafe solid waste management is leading to unhealthy living conditions, unsafe environment, poor quality of life for the disadvantaged people. This inefficient, inequitable, and unsafe management is largely attributed to lack ofcoordination and integration among concerned agencies, actors, and stakeholders. One of the root causes of this lacking is the absence of commonly accessible knowledge-hub that could form the basis of collaborative, shared, and informed teamwork. Owing to this lacking, SUWAS 2018A Bangladesh Team has launched this web-based knowledge hub with available resources, publications, reports, documents, policies etc., with four specific objectives:
1) To put relevant resources in one web-platform to ensure easy accessibility for all stakeholders.
2) To build up an informed network of SUWAS professionals working in Khulna city as well as in other parts of the world so as to avoid repetition of SUWAS-related works at city level.
3) To strengthen coordination among actors through shared knowledge contributed by themselves.
4) To enhance integration and teamwork through timely dissemination of resources on good practices completed by the actors.
5) To ensure informed ownership of end users through giving them easy access to available WASH-related resources/works/initiatives.
With these same objectives, SUWAS 2019A Bangladesh Team has been updating the collection from available resources through coordination and networking among relevant actors.