Unnayan Uddog provides primary health care education to its beneficiaries through group meetings, with particular emphasis on campaigns about STDs, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health care.
It provides advice on reproductive health care including the choice of population control, which is a right of a woman in achieving gender equity. It arranges meetings for exchanging ideas and observes different days relating to gender issues. The programme started in 1998 with financial assistance from the Department of Youth Development, Government of Bangladesh, and is at present run from the organization's own fund.
Arsenic Mitigation Programme
News of arsenic contamination in ground water in the early 1990s came as a great shock to policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. Hand tube wells were once projected as the source of safe water for rural inhabitants. To find the magnitude of the crisis it became imperative to know what proportion of those tube wells were contaminated, and to find a simple, affordable and socially acceptable alternative supply of safe water. Unnayan Uddog undertook the Arsenic Mitigation Programme with the assistance of UNICEF and DPHE. Its objectives are:
- To provide information among community people regarding the arsenic problem
- To determine the extent of arsenic contamination through testing of tube wells
- To identify arsenic affected patients and help them take possible treatment measures
- To mobilize local communities for arsenic mitigation through local government, existing NGOs and CBOs
- To help communities select alternative safe water technologies and find alternative sources of safe water
- To develop a replicable model of community-based arsenic mitigation for wider use in other affected areas
Village Sanitation Centre (VSC)
Unnayan Uddog implements this programme to ensure safe water and sanitation for the rural poor in Tangail, with the financial and technical assistance of NGO Forum for Drinking Water and Sanitation. It advocates the use of safe water and proper sanitation through group meetings and orientation sessions for school students and teachers, out-of-school adolescents, imams and others, shows videos and distributes educational materials. To provide sanitary latrines at low cost it produces slab latrines at its permanent village sanitation centre at Mirzapur, Tangail, under NGO Forum's WATSAN programme.