Collective behaviour change : key to enhance large-scale investment efficiency in sanitation and public health

Dr Kamal Kar presents his ideas on fast tracking nations to become open defecation free (ODF). Many villages are now ODF but this has not been scaled up to district and state levels. The Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)  approach of triggering behaviour change at community level needs to replicated at the institutional level – a process that takes 4-5 years. Dr Kar mentions Benin as a showcase for institutional triggering. By involving several ministries, 100 villages becoming ODF within six months. IRC Associate Georges de Gooijer tells this success story in his blog “Starting rural sanitation in Benin with CLTS: how it became a game-changer”. Moving up the sanitation ladder requires institutional handholding, says Dr Kar. This becomes easier if you can piggyback on villages where community power already helped to achieve ODF status. A presentation for the IRC / IHE Delft WASH Debate "Building institutional capacity for behaviour change and  sanitation programming", held on 11 September 2018 in The Hague, the Netherlands. The presentation itself can be viewed on the Twitter livestream of the WASH Debate.