The principles of community-led total sanitation are being extended to schools and urban areas in eight African countries.IRC will contribute to a school-led total sanitation (SLTS) component in a broader five-year programme led by Plan Netherlands.
Published on: 17/03/2011
Community-led total sanitation (CLTS), as originally devised, relies on community efforts to stop open defecation, promote use of toilets and improve hygiene practices. There are no subsidies for building toilets and no ‘rewards’ for communities that achieve 100% free status.
The Plan programme, “Empowering self-help sanitation of rural and peri-urban communities and schools in Africa”, started in 2010 and will expand existing self-help sanitation programmes in six African countries, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia and Malawi, and introduce it into Ghana and Niger.
IRC has done many years of work on school sanitation and hygiene education with UNICEF, and will lead on aspects of the school-led total sanitation programme, focusing on two areas:
Plan is also working on an urban total sanitation component adapting what has been learnt in rural areas to urban and peri-urban settings. Plan has some experience on this in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but not yet in Africa. However, urbanisation is growing rapidly in Africa and existing sanitation and hygiene circumstances are poor in peri-urban and urban areas, and the timing is right to start pilots in these countries.
This programme aims to reach the schools in both peri-urban and rural communities. Schools can act as centres for change as schoolchildren bring home the lessons they have learnt about toilet use and hygiene behaviour, and are in contact with peers in the community.
To encourage the development of a market for toilets, the programme will engage the private sector, supporting local small or medium entrepreneurs to market the construction and maintenance of sanitation facilities. Another programme element in which IRC will play a role is in setting up national and international CLTS networks.
Having capable long-term facilitators and community sanitation management organisations has been a major challenge in large CLTS programmes. Often, the initial trigger is easier than sustaining a programme as the population continues to grow and toilets grow older and need to be emptied, replaced, or upgraded. The crucial issue to ensure that ODF status is maintained over time, is to get and train committed and long-term facilitators and community sanitation management bodies at and below local government level. As the approach becomes locally institutionalised, local leadership often takes over, as in a peri-urban CLTS project in Sumatra (ISSDP, 2007) and in the Women, Wellbeing, Work, Waste and Sanitation (4WS) project in Bangladesh, Kerala and Sri Lanka (IRC et al., 2007). In Nepal and Pakistan, primary schools have been made part of the organisational support system for CLTS. Experience reported at the Regional Practitioners’ workshop organised by IRC, WaterAid, BRAC and WSSCC showed that especially where there is an unsettled society, schools can provide an effective and politically neutral entry point for CLTS (Khan et al 2008) [1].
In order to co-ordinate these approaches, the sanitation and hygiene implementation activities and results will be shared in a sanitation network, which still has to be created in most of the countries.
Plan has established firm working relations at national and regional level with several organisations and governments. With the support of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), IDS, the knowledge hub on CLTS, and IRC, these national networks will support coordination as well as lobby for these approaches to be included in sanitation policies. By approaching these networks through learning alliances, coordination and quality will be strengthened. IDS is also doing research on effectiveness of CLTS.
The total budget for the programme is € 8.4 million, half of which is provided as a grant by the Netherlands Directorate-General for International Cooperation (DGIS), one third is the estimated investment by communities in their own development, and the remaining part comes via Plan Netherlands from fund raising activities by Dutch primary school children.
Contacts:
[1] Khan, F.; Syed, R.; Riaz, M.; Casella, D. and Kinyanjui, V. 2008. School Led Sanitation Programme: Helping achieve total sanitation outcomes. In Wicken, J.; Verhagen, J.; Sijbesma, C.; Da Silva, C. and P. Ryan (Eds). Beyond construction: Use by all. A collection of case studies from sanitation and hygiene promotion practitioners in South Asia, pp. 181-189. London, UK: WaterAid; Delft, the Netherlands: IRC and Geneva, Switzerland: WSSCC.
Dick de Jong and Marielle Snel
