- Equity, inclusion and sanitation workers
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- Invisible Frontline: Sanitation Workers Across Three Bangladeshi Cities
Invisible Frontline: Sanitation Workers Across Three Bangladeshi Cities
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- shakilWASH
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Topic Author- Portfolio Manager (R&D), PEACE Consultancy(Research & Planning) Former City Coordinator, IUCN Former Urban Planner (Research Team member), SLE Berlin, Germany Former Technical Focal(WASH, CC), TIILER Specialist : #Climate Resilient Inclusive Smart City (CRISC) Planning and Development #Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Planning and Development #NBS
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Invisible Frontline: Sanitation Workers Across Three Bangladeshi Cities
A Policy Brief on Occupational Health, the PPE Paradox, and the Muster Roll Trap
Executive Summary
Bangladesh has achieved over 99% latrine coverage and is widely credited with eradicating open defecation, yet the workers who maintain this achievement remain invisible. Across three Bangladeshi cities - Khulna, Rajshahi, and Rangpur - focus group discussions and key informant interviews reveal a workforce that is 97–99% informally employed, earning as little as USD 30–80 per month, working without insurance, gas detectors, or usable protective equipment, and reporting fatal incidents every year. Between 2018 and 2021 alone, at least seventeen sanitation workers died inside septic tanks and sewers in Dhaka, Tangail, Kushtia, Jaypurhat, and Faridpur. This policy brief synthesises field evidence from five SuSanAforum case studies by the author and identifies three systemic traps that conventional interventions fail to address. The PPE Paradox describes the waste of distributing heavy-duty protective gear that is unusable in 35°C tropical heat. The Muster Roll Trap describes the 97–99% informal workforce employed under a “no work, no payment” rule that strips away every protection of the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006. The Just Transition Gap describes the mechanisation of pit emptying that saves workers from disease while pushing traditional manual emptiers into extreme poverty and child labour. The brief calls on city corporations, the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives, and donor agencies to formalise the workforce, procure climate-adaptive PPE, enforce confined-space protocols, adopt Just Transition policies for displaced manual emptiers, and launch national dignity campaigns. Each recommendation is paired with a responsible actor and an expected improvement.
1. Background and Objectives
Bangladesh's sanitation success is globally recognised: over99% of the population now has access to some form of latrine or toilet (WHO,
2019), and open defecation has been largely eliminated. Behind this achievement, however, lies a largely invisible workforce whose occupational risks are paid for in lives. Pit and septic tank emptying is considered one of Bangladesh's most dangerous professions, owing to the absence of occupational safety and health (OSH) regulations and a poor understanding of the health impacts of repeated exposure to fecal sludge and toxic gases. Documented fatalities make the scale visible. In 2018, three cleaners died inside a containment in Tangi,
Dhaka (Patwary et al., 2021). In 2019, six workers died at once in Jaypurhat and two more in Faridpur while cleaning a single septic tank. In 2021, six more died during containment emptying across Dhaka, Tangail, and Kushtia. The inhalation of methane, hydrogen sulphide, and other gases that accumulate inside confined sewers and septic tanks is the prevalent cause of death. The Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 recognises OSH as a key indicator of labour standards, but its provisions are broadly ignored for sanitation workers because most are informally employed. Sectoral initiatives - the FSM Convention hosted by the FSM Network Bangladesh in Dhaka in 2016, SNV Bangladesh's City Cleaners: Stories of Those Left Behind (Karim, 2017), and the SNV OSH manual for pit-emptiers (Repon et al., 2015) - have raised the issue but have not yet changed working conditions on the ground. This brief synthesises the author's field research across Khulna, Rajshahi, and Rangpur, drawn from focus group discussions with both manual and mechanical sanitation workers and key informant interviews with city corporation Conservancy Officers. Its objective is to give decision-makers a concrete, evidence-based reform agenda.
2. Comparative City Lens: Khulna, Rajshahi, and Rangpur
The three cities examined here represent Bangladesh's geographic and administrative diversity: Khulna in the southwest, Rajshahi in the northwest, and Rangpur in the north. In each, the author conducted focus group discussions with both manual emptiers (who use rope-and-bucket methods and enter pits physically) and mechanical emptiers (who operate vacuum tanker trucks), as well as key informant interviews with the city corporation Conservancy Officer. Despite differences in city size, climate, and demographics, the patterns are strikingly consistent. Table 1 summarises the working conditions in the three city corporations - Khulna City Corporation (KCC), Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC), and Rangpur City Corporation (RpCC).
Three structural patterns emerge from the comparison. First, informality is near-universal: 97% of KCC workers, 98% of RCC workers, and 99% of RpCC workers are employed informally under the “muster roll” system. Second, the wage gap between formal and informal workers is severe: informal workers earn roughly half to one-third of formal municipal salaries, and manual emptiers - the most exposed to toxic gases and fecal sludge - earn as little as USD 30–50 per month on an outsourced basis, far below what a household needs to exit poverty. Third, the “no work, no payment” rule is applied identically in all three cities: absence due to illness, injury, or a death in the family results in immediate pay deductions or full loss of income. None of the three cities provides health insurance, life insurance, or paid sick leave to its informal sanitation workforce. The uniformity of these conditions across three geographically and administratively distinct cities demonstrates that the problem is structural, not city-specific. Reforms must target the national and sectoral level rather than rely on individual city corporations to act voluntarily.
3. The PPE Paradox: Gear They Cannot Use
Standard OHS interventions begin with personal protective equipment (PPE). Many workers in Rangpur and Khulna have received PPE and OHS training - in 2018, again in 2020, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. By conventional project metrics, these workers are “covered”. In practice, the gear is rarely worn. The reason is not ignorance. Workers are fully aware that PPE is essential for their safety. The reason is climate: standard heavy-duty coveralls, gloves, and masks are designed for temperate industrial environments, not for Bangladesh's 35°C-plus tropical heat with extreme humidity. Wearing them means several hours of profuse sweating, restricted movement, and a real risk of heat exhaustion. Faced with that trade-off, workers rationally prioritise immediate physical comfort over long-term, probabilistic health benefits they may never see. This is the PPE Paradox: by distributing standard PPE in tropical climates without climate-adaptive redesign, donor agencies and city corporations are spending scarce resources on equipment that is effectively unusable. The workers most likely to benefit - vacuum tanker operators who interact with fecal sludge daily - are precisely those who find the gear most uncomfortable.
The question for the sector is design-driven. What breathable, lightweight, moisture-wicking PPE designs actually work in South Asian conditions? INGOs and donor agencies - SNV, WaterAid, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank - are well placed to fund the research, development, and procurement of climate-adaptive PPE specifically engineered for tropical sanitation work. Without this step, every PPE distribution campaign will continue to fail in the same way.
4. The Muster Roll Trap: A 99% Informal Workforce
The muster roll is an informal employment arrangement used by all three city corporations. Under it, sanitation workers are paid per work-day rather than as permanent employees, with no written contract, no job security, no paid leave, no health insurance, and no pension. The rule that defines the arrangement is brutal: “no work, no payment”. If a worker is injured handling fecal sludge barehanded, falls ill from repeated gas exposure, or stays home to recover from dysentery, the day's pay is deducted or stopped entirely. The scale is striking: 99% of RpCC sanitation workers, 98% ofRCC, and 97% of KCC are employed under the muster roll. They earn roughly half to one-third of what formal municipal workers earn - USD 80 per month in Rangpur, USD 4 per day in Rajshahi, USD 5–7 per day in Khulna - while performing the same or more hazardous work. Manual emptiers, who descend physically into pits and septic tanks, earn even less, often USD 30–50 per month on an outsourced basis. Without formalisation, every other OHS intervention is effectively non-binding. The Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 contains OSH provisions, but they apply to formal employment relationships; an informal muster roll worker has no contractual standing to invoke them. Training programmes, PPE distributions, and safety guidelines all become optional suggestions that supervisors can enforce or ignore at will.
Formalisation is therefore the single highest-leverage reform available. A written contract, registration with the city corporation,
alignment with the national minimum wage, and enrollment in government health insurance and pension schemes would transform every other intervention from suggestion to enforceable right. This is the precondition on which every other
recommendation in this brief depends.
5. The Just Transition Gap: Mechanisation Without a Safety Net
The Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) agenda actively promotes mechanisation - vacuum tanker trucks replacing the traditional
rope-and-bucket method - as a way to reduce workers' exposure to fecal sludge. From an OHS perspective, this is the right direction: fewer workers enter pits physically, and direct contact with sludge is reduced. From a livelihoods perspective, however, mechanisation without a transition policy has been catastrophic for traditional manual emptiers. In Khulna, the introduction of vacuum tanker services has displaced the community of manual emptiers who previously provided pit-emptying services on demand. The new jobs - driving, maintaining, and operating the trucks - have largely gone to workers from outside the traditional emptier community, leaving the displaced families without income. The result is not just poverty but intergenerational poverty: children are pulled out of school to assist with the diminishing outsourced work that remains.
This is the Just Transition Gap: mechanisation is saving workers from disease while pushing the same families into extreme poverty and child labour. The principle of a Just Transition, articulated by the International Labour Organization, requires that environmental and technological transitions actively protect the workers whose livelihoods they disrupt. Applied to sanitation, this means that every city corporation introducing vacuum trucks must, in the same instrument, commit to absorbing displaced manual emptiers into the new system as drivers, helpers, or maintenance staff; providing apprenticeships and re-training; offering a transitional allowance for the period of displacement; and funding education stipends for the children of manual emptier families so that the next generation can exit the trade.
6. Health Toll, Fatalities, and Social Stigma
The health toll of sanitation work in Bangladesh is documented in fatalities and chronic disease alike. The inhalation of toxic gases methane, hydrogen sulphide, ammonia - that accumulate inside sewers and septic tanks is the prevalent cause of occupational death. Repeated exposure to fecal sludge without protective clothing causes cholera, typhoid, diarrhoea, chronic respiratory infections, and skin infections. Manual emptiers describe breathing difficulties, abdominal pain, and recurrent dysentery as routine conditions of their work. None of the workers interviewed in Khulna, Rajshahi, or Rangpur had access to health insurance, life insurance, occupational health services, or compensation for workplace injury. Compounding the physical risk is a deep social stigma. Sanitation work in Bangladesh is historically performed by low-caste Dalit Hindu communities, commonly called “horijon” or “sweepers”, and treated as “untouchable”. The stigma is operational, not just attitudinal: workers report hiding their profession from neighbours and family members, working at night to
avoid public teasing, and travelling long distances from home to work in order to conceal their occupation.
Regulatory reform alone will not change this. A parallelnational dignity campaign - led by city corporations, civil society, and media - is needed to publicly recognise sanitation workers as essential public health professionals rather than as a caste-bound underclass. Without that cultural shift, formalisation and PPE reform will continue to be undermined by the daily indignities workers face from the very public they serve.
7. Recommendations for Decision-Makers
The recommendations below are grouped by the actor responsiblefor implementation. Each pairs an action with an expected improvement.
A. For City Corporations(KCC, RCC, RpCC, and peer cities)
1. Abolish the muster roll and formalise every sanitation worker with a written contract, wages aligned to the national minimum wage,and enrollment in the government health insurance and pension schemes. Expected improvement: enforceable OSH rights and a 50–100% income gain for currently informal workers.
2. Procure climate-adaptive, breathable PPE designedfor South Asian tropical conditions; mandate periodic replacement at no cost to the worker. Expected improvement: sustained PPE compliance instead of token distribution.
3. Enforce gas-detector checks and confined-space entry permits before every septic tank cleaning; appoint a trained safety supervisor for each conservancy crew. Expected improvement: an immediate reduction in confined-space fatalities.
4. Adopt a written Just Transition policy for manual emptiers displaced by mechanisation: apprenticeships as vacuum-truck drivers or helpers, a one-year transitional allowance, and education stipends for their children. Expected improvement: protection of displaced families from extreme poverty and child labour.
B. For the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives (MoLGRD&C) and the
Ministry of Labour
5. Issue a Sanitation Workers' OSH Rule under the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006, with inspection powers and financial penalties for non-compliant city corporations. Expected improvement: a national enforcement mechanism that does not depend on individual mayoral goodwill.
6. Establish a national compensation fund for sanitation workers injured or killed on duty, financed jointly by city corporations and the central government. Expected improvement: financial security for families currently left with nothing after a fatality.
C. For INGOs and Donor Agencies (SNV, WaterAid, World Bank, ADB, WHO)
7. Fund the research, development, and procurement of climate-adaptive PPE, and condition sanitation financing on worker formalisation and the adoption of Just Transition plans by recipient city corporations. Expected improvement: alignment of donor money with worker outcomes, not just infrastructure outputs.
8. Support a national dignity campaign - through media, school curricula, and public events - to reduce stigma and recognise sanitation
workers as essential public health professionals. Expected improvement: a cultural shift that sustains the regulatory reforms above.
References
1. Shakil,W. I. (2026, August 03). The PPEParadox and Muster Roll Traps: A Reality Check from Rangpur City's Sanitation
Workers [Online forum post]. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum: SuSanAworking groups and regional chapters. forum.susana.org/62-wg-9-public-awarenes...s-sanitation-workers 2. Shakil,W. I. (2023, April 11). Occupationalhealth and safety of sanitation workers in Bangladesh [Online forum post].Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/theme-3-safe-sanitation...-in-bangladesh#34341 3. Shakil, W. I. (2023, April 12). SanitationWorkers: A Frontier Fighter for Building a Healthy City[Case Study of Khulna
City] [Onlineforum post]. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/health-and-safety-aspec...rom-bangladesh#34344 4. Shakil, W. I. (2023,July 04). Sanitation Workers: A Frontier Fighter for Building a Healthy City[Case Study of Rajshahi City, Bangladesh] [Online forum post]. SustainableSanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/health-and-safety-aspec...rom-bangladesh#34573 5. Shakil, W. I. (2023, July 04). Sanitation Workers: A Frontier Fighter for Building a Healthy City [Case Study of Rangpur City, Bangladesh] [Online forum post]. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/health-and-safety-aspec...rom-bangladesh#34575 6. World HealthOrganization. (2019). Sanitation coverage in Bangladesh: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme data. 7. Government ofBangladesh. (2006). Bangladesh Labour Act, 2006 (Act No. 42 of 2006). 8. Karim, M. (2017).City Cleaners: Stories of Those Left Behind. SNV Bangladesh. 9. Repon et al.(2015). Occupational Safety and Health Manual for Pit-Emptiers. SNV Bangladesh. 10. Patwary et al.(2021). Cited in SuSanA Forum post on Tangi, Dhaka sanitation worker deaths, 2018. 11. FSM NetworkBangladesh. (2016). FSM Convention, Dhaka. 12. International Labour Organization. (2015). Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All.
Executive Summary
Bangladesh has achieved over 99% latrine coverage and is widely credited with eradicating open defecation, yet the workers who maintain this achievement remain invisible. Across three Bangladeshi cities - Khulna, Rajshahi, and Rangpur - focus group discussions and key informant interviews reveal a workforce that is 97–99% informally employed, earning as little as USD 30–80 per month, working without insurance, gas detectors, or usable protective equipment, and reporting fatal incidents every year. Between 2018 and 2021 alone, at least seventeen sanitation workers died inside septic tanks and sewers in Dhaka, Tangail, Kushtia, Jaypurhat, and Faridpur. This policy brief synthesises field evidence from five SuSanAforum case studies by the author and identifies three systemic traps that conventional interventions fail to address. The PPE Paradox describes the waste of distributing heavy-duty protective gear that is unusable in 35°C tropical heat. The Muster Roll Trap describes the 97–99% informal workforce employed under a “no work, no payment” rule that strips away every protection of the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006. The Just Transition Gap describes the mechanisation of pit emptying that saves workers from disease while pushing traditional manual emptiers into extreme poverty and child labour. The brief calls on city corporations, the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives, and donor agencies to formalise the workforce, procure climate-adaptive PPE, enforce confined-space protocols, adopt Just Transition policies for displaced manual emptiers, and launch national dignity campaigns. Each recommendation is paired with a responsible actor and an expected improvement.
1. Background and Objectives
Bangladesh's sanitation success is globally recognised: over99% of the population now has access to some form of latrine or toilet (WHO,
2019), and open defecation has been largely eliminated. Behind this achievement, however, lies a largely invisible workforce whose occupational risks are paid for in lives. Pit and septic tank emptying is considered one of Bangladesh's most dangerous professions, owing to the absence of occupational safety and health (OSH) regulations and a poor understanding of the health impacts of repeated exposure to fecal sludge and toxic gases. Documented fatalities make the scale visible. In 2018, three cleaners died inside a containment in Tangi,
Dhaka (Patwary et al., 2021). In 2019, six workers died at once in Jaypurhat and two more in Faridpur while cleaning a single septic tank. In 2021, six more died during containment emptying across Dhaka, Tangail, and Kushtia. The inhalation of methane, hydrogen sulphide, and other gases that accumulate inside confined sewers and septic tanks is the prevalent cause of death. The Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 recognises OSH as a key indicator of labour standards, but its provisions are broadly ignored for sanitation workers because most are informally employed. Sectoral initiatives - the FSM Convention hosted by the FSM Network Bangladesh in Dhaka in 2016, SNV Bangladesh's City Cleaners: Stories of Those Left Behind (Karim, 2017), and the SNV OSH manual for pit-emptiers (Repon et al., 2015) - have raised the issue but have not yet changed working conditions on the ground. This brief synthesises the author's field research across Khulna, Rajshahi, and Rangpur, drawn from focus group discussions with both manual and mechanical sanitation workers and key informant interviews with city corporation Conservancy Officers. Its objective is to give decision-makers a concrete, evidence-based reform agenda.
2. Comparative City Lens: Khulna, Rajshahi, and Rangpur
The three cities examined here represent Bangladesh's geographic and administrative diversity: Khulna in the southwest, Rajshahi in the northwest, and Rangpur in the north. In each, the author conducted focus group discussions with both manual emptiers (who use rope-and-bucket methods and enter pits physically) and mechanical emptiers (who operate vacuum tanker trucks), as well as key informant interviews with the city corporation Conservancy Officer. Despite differences in city size, climate, and demographics, the patterns are strikingly consistent. Table 1 summarises the working conditions in the three city corporations - Khulna City Corporation (KCC), Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC), and Rangpur City Corporation (RpCC).
Table 1. WorkingConditions of Sanitation Workers in Three Bangladeshi Cities
3. The PPE Paradox: Gear They Cannot Use
Standard OHS interventions begin with personal protective equipment (PPE). Many workers in Rangpur and Khulna have received PPE and OHS training - in 2018, again in 2020, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. By conventional project metrics, these workers are “covered”. In practice, the gear is rarely worn. The reason is not ignorance. Workers are fully aware that PPE is essential for their safety. The reason is climate: standard heavy-duty coveralls, gloves, and masks are designed for temperate industrial environments, not for Bangladesh's 35°C-plus tropical heat with extreme humidity. Wearing them means several hours of profuse sweating, restricted movement, and a real risk of heat exhaustion. Faced with that trade-off, workers rationally prioritise immediate physical comfort over long-term, probabilistic health benefits they may never see. This is the PPE Paradox: by distributing standard PPE in tropical climates without climate-adaptive redesign, donor agencies and city corporations are spending scarce resources on equipment that is effectively unusable. The workers most likely to benefit - vacuum tanker operators who interact with fecal sludge daily - are precisely those who find the gear most uncomfortable.
- Abdul Malek, vacuum tanker operator, Rangpur City Corporation (6 years in profession)
|
4. The Muster Roll Trap: A 99% Informal Workforce
The muster roll is an informal employment arrangement used by all three city corporations. Under it, sanitation workers are paid per work-day rather than as permanent employees, with no written contract, no job security, no paid leave, no health insurance, and no pension. The rule that defines the arrangement is brutal: “no work, no payment”. If a worker is injured handling fecal sludge barehanded, falls ill from repeated gas exposure, or stays home to recover from dysentery, the day's pay is deducted or stopped entirely. The scale is striking: 99% of RpCC sanitation workers, 98% ofRCC, and 97% of KCC are employed under the muster roll. They earn roughly half to one-third of what formal municipal workers earn - USD 80 per month in Rangpur, USD 4 per day in Rajshahi, USD 5–7 per day in Khulna - while performing the same or more hazardous work. Manual emptiers, who descend physically into pits and septic tanks, earn even less, often USD 30–50 per month on an outsourced basis. Without formalisation, every other OHS intervention is effectively non-binding. The Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 contains OSH provisions, but they apply to formal employment relationships; an informal muster roll worker has no contractual standing to invoke them. Training programmes, PPE distributions, and safety guidelines all become optional suggestions that supervisors can enforce or ignore at will.
- Mosal Basfor, manual emptier, Rangpur City Corporation (12 years in profession, began at
age 13) |
alignment with the national minimum wage, and enrollment in government health insurance and pension schemes would transform every other intervention from suggestion to enforceable right. This is the precondition on which every other
recommendation in this brief depends.
5. The Just Transition Gap: Mechanisation Without a Safety Net
The Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) agenda actively promotes mechanisation - vacuum tanker trucks replacing the traditional
rope-and-bucket method - as a way to reduce workers' exposure to fecal sludge. From an OHS perspective, this is the right direction: fewer workers enter pits physically, and direct contact with sludge is reduced. From a livelihoods perspective, however, mechanisation without a transition policy has been catastrophic for traditional manual emptiers. In Khulna, the introduction of vacuum tanker services has displaced the community of manual emptiers who previously provided pit-emptying services on demand. The new jobs - driving, maintaining, and operating the trucks - have largely gone to workers from outside the traditional emptier community, leaving the displaced families without income. The result is not just poverty but intergenerational poverty: children are pulled out of school to assist with the diminishing outsourced work that remains.
- Gopal Das, manual emptier, Khulna City Corporation (25 years in profession)
|
6. Health Toll, Fatalities, and Social Stigma
The health toll of sanitation work in Bangladesh is documented in fatalities and chronic disease alike. The inhalation of toxic gases methane, hydrogen sulphide, ammonia - that accumulate inside sewers and septic tanks is the prevalent cause of occupational death. Repeated exposure to fecal sludge without protective clothing causes cholera, typhoid, diarrhoea, chronic respiratory infections, and skin infections. Manual emptiers describe breathing difficulties, abdominal pain, and recurrent dysentery as routine conditions of their work. None of the workers interviewed in Khulna, Rajshahi, or Rangpur had access to health insurance, life insurance, occupational health services, or compensation for workplace injury. Compounding the physical risk is a deep social stigma. Sanitation work in Bangladesh is historically performed by low-caste Dalit Hindu communities, commonly called “horijon” or “sweepers”, and treated as “untouchable”. The stigma is operational, not just attitudinal: workers report hiding their profession from neighbours and family members, working at night to
avoid public teasing, and travelling long distances from home to work in order to conceal their occupation.
- Nitto Ranjan Hela, manual emptier, Rajshahi City Corporation (28 years in profession, age 63)
|
7. Recommendations for Decision-Makers
The recommendations below are grouped by the actor responsiblefor implementation. Each pairs an action with an expected improvement.
A. For City Corporations(KCC, RCC, RpCC, and peer cities)
1. Abolish the muster roll and formalise every sanitation worker with a written contract, wages aligned to the national minimum wage,and enrollment in the government health insurance and pension schemes. Expected improvement: enforceable OSH rights and a 50–100% income gain for currently informal workers.
2. Procure climate-adaptive, breathable PPE designedfor South Asian tropical conditions; mandate periodic replacement at no cost to the worker. Expected improvement: sustained PPE compliance instead of token distribution.
3. Enforce gas-detector checks and confined-space entry permits before every septic tank cleaning; appoint a trained safety supervisor for each conservancy crew. Expected improvement: an immediate reduction in confined-space fatalities.
4. Adopt a written Just Transition policy for manual emptiers displaced by mechanisation: apprenticeships as vacuum-truck drivers or helpers, a one-year transitional allowance, and education stipends for their children. Expected improvement: protection of displaced families from extreme poverty and child labour.
B. For the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives (MoLGRD&C) and the
Ministry of Labour
5. Issue a Sanitation Workers' OSH Rule under the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006, with inspection powers and financial penalties for non-compliant city corporations. Expected improvement: a national enforcement mechanism that does not depend on individual mayoral goodwill.
6. Establish a national compensation fund for sanitation workers injured or killed on duty, financed jointly by city corporations and the central government. Expected improvement: financial security for families currently left with nothing after a fatality.
C. For INGOs and Donor Agencies (SNV, WaterAid, World Bank, ADB, WHO)
7. Fund the research, development, and procurement of climate-adaptive PPE, and condition sanitation financing on worker formalisation and the adoption of Just Transition plans by recipient city corporations. Expected improvement: alignment of donor money with worker outcomes, not just infrastructure outputs.
8. Support a national dignity campaign - through media, school curricula, and public events - to reduce stigma and recognise sanitation
workers as essential public health professionals. Expected improvement: a cultural shift that sustains the regulatory reforms above.
References
1. Shakil,W. I. (2026, August 03). The PPEParadox and Muster Roll Traps: A Reality Check from Rangpur City's Sanitation
Workers [Online forum post]. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum: SuSanAworking groups and regional chapters. forum.susana.org/62-wg-9-public-awarenes...s-sanitation-workers 2. Shakil,W. I. (2023, April 11). Occupationalhealth and safety of sanitation workers in Bangladesh [Online forum post].Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/theme-3-safe-sanitation...-in-bangladesh#34341 3. Shakil, W. I. (2023, April 12). SanitationWorkers: A Frontier Fighter for Building a Healthy City[Case Study of Khulna
City] [Onlineforum post]. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/health-and-safety-aspec...rom-bangladesh#34344 4. Shakil, W. I. (2023,July 04). Sanitation Workers: A Frontier Fighter for Building a Healthy City[Case Study of Rajshahi City, Bangladesh] [Online forum post]. SustainableSanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/health-and-safety-aspec...rom-bangladesh#34573 5. Shakil, W. I. (2023, July 04). Sanitation Workers: A Frontier Fighter for Building a Healthy City [Case Study of Rangpur City, Bangladesh] [Online forum post]. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Forum. forum.susana.org/health-and-safety-aspec...rom-bangladesh#34575 6. World HealthOrganization. (2019). Sanitation coverage in Bangladesh: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme data. 7. Government ofBangladesh. (2006). Bangladesh Labour Act, 2006 (Act No. 42 of 2006). 8. Karim, M. (2017).City Cleaners: Stories of Those Left Behind. SNV Bangladesh. 9. Repon et al.(2015). Occupational Safety and Health Manual for Pit-Emptiers. SNV Bangladesh. 10. Patwary et al.(2021). Cited in SuSanA Forum post on Tangi, Dhaka sanitation worker deaths, 2018. 11. FSM NetworkBangladesh. (2016). FSM Convention, Dhaka. 12. International Labour Organization. (2015). Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All.
Woakimul Islam Shakil
Portfolio Manager (R&D),
PEACE Consultancy(Research & Planning)
Former City Coordinator, IUCN
Former Urban Planner (Research Team member),
SLE Berlin, Germany
Former Technical Focal(WASH, CC), TIILER
Specialist :
#Climate Resilient Inclusive Smart City (CRISC) Planning and Development
#Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Planning and Development
#Circular Economy Model
#Nature-Based Solution
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Cell: +8801744976369
Portfolio Manager (R&D),
PEACE Consultancy(Research & Planning)
Former City Coordinator, IUCN
Former Urban Planner (Research Team member),
SLE Berlin, Germany
Former Technical Focal(WASH, CC), TIILER
Specialist :
#Climate Resilient Inclusive Smart City (CRISC) Planning and Development
#Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Planning and Development
#Circular Economy Model
#Nature-Based Solution
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Cell: +8801744976369
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