River and Canal Intelligence Challenge

This challenge aims to identify, pilot, and validate an Integrated River and Canal Intelligence System that strengthens risk-informed water management across Bangladesh's rivers and canals, contributing to resilience for fisheries, aquaculture, and river-dependent communities against floods, erosion, and changing water conditions.

Bangladesh sits at the meeting point of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna and Padma, exceptionally large alluvial rivers shaped by unpredictable erosion, scour depths of up to 50 meters, and flood velocities reaching 4.5 meters per second. Each year, riverbank erosion claims around 8,700 hectares of land, displaces some 200,000 people, and disrupts fisheries that feed 18 million people and supply 60% of the country's animal protein.

Today, the river management data is distributed across multiple ministries and agencies. While each holds valuable information, ability to integrate and  analyze t these datasets across institutional boundaries remains a critical gap, limiting informed planning, operations, and quick response to dynamic river conditions. As climate variability accelerates and as Bangladesh advances ambitious river management programs, including 20,000 km of river excavation and related works, the opportunity to connect water data across agencies and turn it into actionable intelligence has never been greater. A new generation of integrated digital solutions is needed to support smarter, risk-informed decisions whose impact reaches every fisher, farmer, and community living along these rivers.