Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Origin, Spread and Scaling up

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Origin, Spread and Scaling up
Dr. Kamal Kar
CLTS Foundation, Calcutta, India
Presented at the WASH Conference 2011
16-20 May 2011

Globally millions of tones of human excreta poured in the open everyday
In India alone nearly 600 millions are practicing open defecation, thousands of truck loads of shit is being released in the open everyday, more than 42 children dying every hour from diarrhea, & waterborne enteric diseases
OD contaminates water bodies on a daily basis and valuable human excreta not used in food security A child dies in every 15 second, millions of U5 children suffering sever bouts of diarrhea (mostly poor)

Traditional - professional ‘mind-set’ in tackling the problems
Subsidize * Standardize *Prescribe * Top-down hygiene behaviour teaching* Health as key motivator for hygiene behaviour change
Attract the poor in ways like rewards so that they use toilets

Fate of free toilets in a slum of a Municipality town near Calcutta, India

Fate of subsidized sanitation hardware- Portloko, Sierra Leone, Ibb, Yemen
Who’s design for whom?

Fate of sanitation subsidy in Yemen

Abandoned Collapsed Communal Latrine –Dangme West District, Greater Accra Region, Ghana

The Origin
Originated in Bangladesh in 1999-2000 from the process of evaluation of a traditional WATSAN project
Spread rapidly in Bangladesh through NGOs mainly Water Aid, Plan International and partner NGOs
DFID supported scaling it up in Bangladesh
WSP (SA and EAP) was instrumental in bringing it to India, Indonesia, and other countries in South Asia and East Asia Pacific regions
Through Plan International introduced in 13 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa in 2007
Since 2008 with support of UNICEF introduced in 22 countries in Africa including West and Central Africa and in Latin America (Bolivia)

More than 20 million people in 44 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America benefit from CLTS
More than 1000 facilitators and trainers in these countries have been actively engaged in implementing and training of CLTS
The Hand Book on CLTS has been translated in to at least ten different languages including French, Spanish and Portuguese

What is Community – Led Total Sanitation ?
They are total & involve/affect everyone in communities e.g. total elimination of open defecation, total freedom from hunger)
Collective Community decision & collective local action are the keys
Social Solidarity and cooperation are in abundance
They are locally decided and don't dependent on external subsidies and prescriptions or pressures
Natural Leaders emerge from collective local actions who lead future collective initiatives
They often don’t follow externally determined mode of development and blue print
Local diversity and innovations are main elements

Identification of right person in the community
Self Empowered Committee formed
Defecation
area transect
Defecation
Mapping
Flow diagram
Calculation of
faeces
etc.
Entry/ Ignition
PRA
How to get a latrine slab
Registration daily monitoring on map
Start pit latrine from tomorrow
Community realization of terrible impact of faecal-oral contamination
Spreading messages from the mosque
We do it first and stop open defecation
Each of us cover 10 families
10 H/H
10 H/H
Diagrammatic presentation of the process of igniting Community- Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)

Land less don’t have place for defecation. Land owners often blame them for defecating in open. Landless poor (women specially) are the worst victims who want to come out of that humiliation.
Will form positive pressure groups from within to convince others for having latrine
X
Better off
X
X
L
X
X
L
X
L
X
L
L
Medium
X
Spoiling environment by open defecation
X
X
X
X
X
X
Poor
X
X
X
Very poor
L
L
X
X
X
X
Latrine owners can’t get rid of negative impacts as many others adding faces everywhere.
L
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Participatory
Planning
P. R. A.
X
X
X
Moving towards 100% sanitised village

More yellow powder in places where there is more shit- Sierra Leone

Food and shit demonstration

Children’s procession protesting against open defecation

Worried faces of mothers after their own analysis- Llala Gua, Bolivia
Shit everywhere. Our children growing on shit- we can’t accept this

Notice who is teaching and who is learning

“If we defecate in the open, we eat each others shit, if you don’t wash your hands with ash or soap, you eat your own shit” - a Natural Leader of CLTS from Malawi

Hundreds of low-cost local community-made toilets are surfacing in the rural landscape in CLTS villages in Bangladesh.

Who’s idea and who's decision matters in household sanitation?South Sumatra, Indonesia

Great mosaic of latrine models innovated by local communities in Kampung Spu in Cambodia

Do we have patience to allow communities to gradually move up the Sanitation Ladder?
Sanitation behaviors changes as community moves up the ladder
Pour flush latrine
Latrines with plastic pan and water seal
Offset Pit latrines
Simple Pit Latrines
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
Open defecation
O

Newly constructed toilets in Kampong Svay villages, Kampong Tralach district of Kampong Chhnang province in Cambodia - great sense of ownership and pride. Mr.Hoeun invites neighbours to use his toilet to get more manure for his crops

Use of ash after defecation in direct pit latrine is an innovation by the community of Skun villages of Tbeng Commune of Siem Reap province in Cambodia. One gets potash rich manure at the end. Whose idea?

Community Innovated direct pit latrine- Skun village, Banteay Srei, Cambodia

Local Community Innovation in Kalyani

Proud Kepala Desa showing different toilet models to visitors- Lumajang,East Java, Indonesia

Local Community Innovation in Kalyani

Construction details of community innovated low-cost latrine
Tin sheet, old plastic bottles and plastic sheets are used to construct such toilets

Locally innovated toilet model in flood prone areas and in places with high water table at Sambas, West Kalimantan

Repair
platform
of all 69
hand tube wells
Stop
Open
Defecation
All 213 H/H
Clean up
drain
In 5 months
ten slums covering
more than 800 H/Hs
have stopped OD by
constructing toilets mobilizing
more money than what KUSP
could offer as subsidy
Clean up
garbage and
Repair Road

Signboard declaring Open Defecation-Free, Para Vidyasagar Colony, Kalyani Municipality, West Bengal

Are these all sustainable change or just another jargon?
Communities in ODF villages in Bangladesh, Kenya, in Mekong delta and in other countries rebuilt their toilets after they were destroyed by flooding
Reduction in Cholera and diarrhea in the districts of Nyando, Busia, Siaya in Nyanza and Western provinces of Kenya after CLTS was introduced never returned back with that severity. All communities seriously maintain ODF status
100% ODF villages in many communities did loose that that status but never returned to the level where they were before CLTS

Quack doctors in thousands of villages lost their income seriously
Sale of medicines of diarrhea/dysentery dropped in village medicine shops
Sale of sanitary hardware in shops in village shops in Indonesia increased sharply
Everyday new villages all over the world are declaring themselves ODF
For more please look at the book “Shit Matters”

Global Spread of CLTS
Afghanistan
NEPAL
PAKISTAN
EGYPT
BANGLADESH
INDIA
YEMEN
CAMBODIA
ETHIOPIA
SIERRA LEONE
NIGERIA
UGANDA
KENYA
INDONESIA
TANZANIA
EAST TIMOR
MALAWI
ZAMBIA
BOLIVIA

What are the major challenges of sustainability?
In the next slide

Challenge of multiplying Facilitators, Trainers and Community Consultants
The pace with which demand for CLTS is growing there is need to train hundreds of trainers immediately in Africa and Latin America (Franco phone Africa, Spanish speaking countries specially)
Thousands of ‘Natural Leaders’ turned in to ‘Community Consultants’ with in countries
Dozens of Champions with in the Government Ministries and Departments
A few Ministers and MPs or elected people’s representatives in each countries

Institutional Challenges
Attitudes and mind sets of professionals in the institutions and their belief on local community capacity
Feeling of loosing control and technical and academic supremacy by engineering, health and social development professionals
Institutional hierarchy and unclear understanding of the ground reality including poor functional linkages with the front line

Difficulty to escape from the old established mind-set of ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ defining ‘uppers’ and ‘lowers’
Inertia in moving out of the preference of ‘things’ to ‘people’. Shiftfrom‘latrine construction’ to ‘creating Natural Leaders’ and ‘ODF villages’
Pressure of spending huge sums
Variations in the focus of institutions working only on water and sanitation versus those working with wider humane objectives

CLTS as a fad and some have their own version of ‘community led’(subtle difference between ‘functional participation’ to ‘interactive participation’ or ‘self mobilization’)
Struggle to streamline other approaches of sanitation with true empowerment encouraged in CLTS. TSSM in Indonesia, TSC in India, others in Ethiopia, individual house hold vs community
CLTS is just one another approach and it might survive better if other sanitation approaches work freely without using this label. All approaches have uniqueness.

Challenges of intellectual institutional supremacy- who knows more and who prescribes the best solutions?
Competition for attracting more donor funding by implementing agencies
Struggle and compromise to fit in a new community led approach in the old existing system of government structure designed to perform in a ‘supply driven’ rather than ‘demand driven’ mode

Political Challenges
Asia: Countries like India, China with better per capita still support subsidized, externally prescribed household sanitation where as countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia scaled up CLTS exponentially. Percentage of usage of externally funded toilets are appalling
Africa: Quicker understanding and acceptance of the approach by governments of Sierra Leone, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia

Abandoned Free Latrines depicts
welfare mindset of institutions
in Fatenayili ODF Village

Existing ‘Social solidarity and community cooperation’ as insider to insider subsidy- can those be recognized?
Need to document and recognize huge local resources mobilized by local communities

Distinct example of social solidarity- rich of village declared help for all to achieve ODF status

What is the potential of CLTS in countries in the East Asia and the Pacific region?
CLTS has been adopted by the government of Indonesia, Cambodia and has been spreading fast
WESLIC-III has been scaling up CLTS
In Cambodia, Lao, PDR, Vietnam
Introduced in East Timor by Water Aid Australia
Still a lot need to be done
Major sector players and funding agencies need to have a better understanding of the approach and its underlying principals, and support

Goal 7
Sanitation halving proportion without access
Goal 6
Major diseases especially diarrhea
Goal 4
Under 5 mortality
MDG Goals
MDG 5
Maternal mortality
CLTS and MDG Goals

The Ethical Challenges
The challenges are personal, professional and institutional.
“We” and our normal views and reflexes are the problem.
“They”, people in communities, are the solution.
Serious unlearning is entailed, and then continuous learning, adapting, improvising and innovating to enable the poor to become an active partner in development and not remain as passive recipient.
These changes of understanding and behaviour apply at all levels – Ministers, senior officials, staff in funding agencies, and Government and NGO staff.

What are our challenges today?
Sanitation to be addressed as a part of larger poverty reduction strategy given its known implications for dignity, productivity, human health and well being.
Emergence of ODF communities - first critical step towards achieving safe sanitation that effectively prevents the fecal contamination of water
Initially developing few hundreds of ODF Communities as learning laboratories for CLTS
Natural Leaders as Community Consultants- scaling up CLTS
How to enhance emergence of innovative local institutions as champions on CLTS?
How to involve local communities as active partners of research in technology development and in sanitation marketing?

THANK YOU

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Origin, Spread and Scaling up

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Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Origin, Spread and Scaling up Presentation Transcript

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