A young girl using a new hand pump in Bihar, India provided by Oxfam. © Oxfam GB.
The Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation provided a grant of £30,000 in 2007/08 to support Oxfam’s innovative River Basin Programme in Bangladesh, India and Nepal.
Oxfam is a development, relief and campaigning organisation that works with others to find lasting solutions to poverty and suffering around the world.
For the 180 million people living in the Ganges/Brahmaputra river basin, natural disasters are a fact of life. During the monsoon season, families’ homes and land become submerged. They lose their crops, and their animals often perish. Poor people are particularly vulnerable, so being well prepared can mean the difference between life and death.
Oxfam and its local partners are working to reduce the threat to people’s lives and livelihoods, giving them security to plan for the future. Oxfam believes that by working with local partners, who can best understand the needs of poor people in the region, this project is more likely to be sustainable and have a greater impact.
Recent activities have included constructing five flood shelters, for people to take refuge during the floods. Each shelter has been installed with solar power lighting for use throughout the year as a community meeting place and evening study centre for children. Forty tube wells and 70 toilets have been built, providing clean drinking water and good sanitation throughout the year, and ten rescue boats have been constructed to get people to shelter safely during the floods, and produce to market.
As a result of Oxfam’s River Basin Programme, thousands of vulnerable people living in flood prone areas in Bangladesh, India and Nepal will be in a much stronger position to prepare for, and cope with, the annual flooding.
Visit the Oxfam website.