Bearing this in mind, during the Meghna Knowledge Forum, facilitated by IUCN and partners in June 2021, a group of youth from Bangladesh and India designed a ‘game’ to educate young water professionals from the GBM countries on the river systems and various threats these systems are facing. The game was intended to be both educational and enjoyable. ‘River Game’, as the youth named it, shows how conservation and environmental agencies need to master in edutainment – merging education and entertainment to connect children and youth to river.

      Photo: © IUCN

Bangladesh is known as the land of rivers where historically more than thousand rivers passed through a small and densely populated land area. A significant number of those rivers have already disappeared and the remaining ones are under continuous threats due to lack of necessary environmental flow (quantity, quality and timing), different forms of river pollution and unabated encroachment of rivers. Such failure to conserve the river ecosystems is resulting in loss of biodiversity and cultural heritage as well as increased natural hazards like flood and waterlogging. It has significant economic impacts such as loss of livelihoods of river-dependent communities like fisherfolks and farmers, and decreased trading through cheaper inland water transport. It is predicted that in the future, there would be severe development and ecological implications for Bangladesh if existing rivers are not conserved and some of the lost rivers are not survived. Considering this, the High Court of Bangladesh declared the rivers as living entities.

Bangladesh shares 54 transboundary rivers with India including large rivers like the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Surma-Kushiyara-Meghna and Teesta. Including the Transboundary Rivers, status of other rivers in India is almost similar to the rivers in Bangladesh. Pollution, infrastructure development on rivers and water diversion for irrigation are some of the major threats to rivers in India. In India, the National River Conservation Directorate (NRCD) has been working to conserve the rivers while in Bangladesh the National River Conservation Commission Bangladesh (NRCCB) has been playing such role since 2013. For their works on river conservation, NRCD and NRCCB need to strengthen evidence-based river conservation through research, capacity building initiatives, mass awareness and multi-stakeholder networking and dialogue.

Since around half of the population are children and youth aged under 24 years in Bangladesh and India, along with civil society organizations and related government agencies, children and youth are important target groups for river conservation efforts made by NRCD and NRCCB as well as other organizations doing similar works. Although the National Youth Policy 2017 of Bangladesh and National Youth Policy 2014 of India encourage engagement of youth in environmental protection, exploring suitable ways to engage them in river conservation efforts by different agencies has not been clearly visible so far.

      Photo: © IUCN

It has been observed that traditional lecture, discussion and workshop modes are mostly used while targeting children and youth to increase their engagement in nature conservation as well as river conservation, which do not attract them significantly. Children and youth have therefore gradually been demanding for alternative methods to learn about their connection to nature and river. Since online and physical games are popular among children and youth, some of them have been developing education materials through designing games. ‘The River Game’ has come up as such an idea by a group of young people from Bangladesh and India to connect children and youth of Bangladesh and India to their threatened rivers. Through edutainment, the River Game intended to create an urge within children and youth to conserve the river ecosystems of Bangladesh and India for transboundary basin-level cooperation in coming days.

‘The River Game’ has been first piloted as an online side event at the Meghna Knowledge Forum organised in June 2021. During the River Game, the participants were asked to grab as many items as they can with their two hands and demonstrate everyone. It was a competition among the participants to observe who has the best carrying capacity. Participants acknowledged that they have distinct level of carrying capacity and a limit to carry. The youth organisers linked this game on human carrying capacity to carrying capacity of rivers as living entities. They demonstrated the amount of pollution, encroachment and extraction rivers in Bangladesh and India have to sustain, pushing those rivers reach at tipping point and collapse as living entities.

Through the activities of the River Game, participants understood the river biodiversity, changes and effects of different human activities on the river ecosystem, the culture related to river, different forms of river pollution, relationship of upstream and downstream communities of a river basin, fisheries and other resources offered by river for economic development in an entertaining manner. They also offered solutions to revive river ecosystem by providing inputs in an online board shared by all participants.

The River Game organized by young people from Bangladesh and India has re-emphasized the fact that we need to use edutainment to promote river literacy in establishing connection to rivers of youth and children. Through an interactive and participatory design, young people can understand that stakeholders’ role may become both positive are negative for the river based on the activities they are engaged in. Moreover, such an interaction helps in promoting the narrative that rivers are living entities and have limited carrying capacity or tipping point like any living entity.

One of the participants of the River Game, Sarita Sundari Rout of Oxfam Novib mentioned, ‘River and water are not everybody’s business; our role is to make it everybody’s business’. Many children and youth are now disconnected from rivers and river restoration is not their business. To make it the business of children and youth, we need to speak in the language of children and youth and the way they speak. The River Game jointly designed by youth from Bangladesh and India demonstrated that creative minds of children and youth need to be utilized in our journey to protect, manage and restore our precious rivers and gain benefits from shared river basin like Meghna.    

The River Game

"The River Game’ was designed as a virtual event during the Meghna Knowledge Forum, facilitated by IUCN and partners from 22 to 24 June 2021 with 17 partner organizations, supported by Oxfam TROSA programme which is funded by the Swedish Government. The forum was designed as a virtual event and provided a learning exchange platform on river and inclusive water governance issues in the Meghna river basin shared by Bangladesh and India. It aimed to facilitate partnerships to address knowledge gaps in the implementation of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) in the Meghna river basin. Through interactive online games and activities, the River Game session tried to address all the three themes of the Meghna Knowledge Forum; Geophysics and ecological diversity, Culture and socioeconomics and Inclusive Governance.