Has the advent of community-led total sanitation (CLTS) brought any meaningful change in our communities' attitude towards open defecation?

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is an innovation by Kamal Kar aimed at ending open defecation in our communities. This strategy has been with us for a while now and its high time we did an evaluation of it to find out if it is yielding results and possibly build on its successes.

4 Answers

1. I will definitely go with Kevin on this because a lot of effort has been made in the area of rural sanitation which is still ongoing but the urban sanitation has been ignored or relegated to the background. The way I see it, if it stays like this, we have succeeded in eliminated hygiene and sanitation challenges in the rural areas and left the urban. Take Kano State in Nigeria for example, a lot of work is going on in the area of WASH in the rural areas, but a peek at the Kano metropolis will reveal some disgusting sites which happens to lie in the center of the city. On your way to Kano from Abuja right through Kaduna and Zaria at the main entrance, there is a large open defecation site. Even when you are in a fast moving vehicle and not paying attention to it, the stench will definitely draw your attention. So the questions, is it that the government has not done something about it or does it lie with the attitude of the people living in this area? To the best of my knowledge, we are still grappling with this strategy in the rural while the urban stares us in our face. What would CLTS do in the case of an urban society like Kano to eliminate this nuisance? If the government is not doing enough, what should it do then? The challenge looks enormous here.

2. Kevin Tayler writing on Community of Practice on Hygiene and Sanitation in Development Countries, a platform on LinkedIn has this to say "Writing from Dhaka after a week in Comilla, I feel that Deepak underestimates the problems associated with ending open defecation in Bangladesh. While it seems to be true that great strides have been made in convincing rural people of the need to use toilets rather than to defecate in the open, much remains to be done on the urban side. To give some examples. There is virtually no functioning 'official' sewerage in Dhaka city (although there are combined sewerage systems discharging locally) which means that almost all the faecal material produced ends up in watercourses, which amounts to open defecation at a distance. No other town or city in Bangladesh has formal sewerage. It is true that many people, particularly in low-income areas, rely on on-site sanitation but there are virtually no faecal sludge removal and transport services and, to my knowledge, only one small faecal sludge treatment plant - installed with help from Practical Action. Programmes such as UPPR are promoting the use of twin pit toilets, which in theory should produce sludge that is safe to handle and can be used as an agricultural input but the reality in Bangladesh, as in other places, is that people do not use the twin pit system as intended by its designers. When both pits are full, the waste has to be removed, which is normally done manually, with the sludge disposed of to a nearby watercourse. So, yes there has been much progress here but there remains a long way to go before we can really say that areas are ODF. Charles is right on this issue and I think raises the other important question as to what will happen in the long term".

3. @Alexander, I have also witnessed some of these changes too happening in Nigeria but not everywhere as various communities have received it according to their perceptions. For example, Adeel Malik writing from Pakistan said this under the Community of Practice on Hygiene and Sanitation on Linkedin "I think it really depends on the context, sure we may have some success stories from some parts of the world yet on the other hand I have heard and experienced some horrible ones. I can speak only in the case of Pakistan for now, where according to my opinion, it was a great failure. Just quoting one example from one of the so called 'success stories" a.k.a ODF villages, a physically challenged man (suffering from Polio) preferred to defecate in the open, even in the rain, despite the fact that he could not walk without crutches. I think we need to look deeper into the socio-cultural norms and values and then think of the suitability of the approach. I do believe the approach itself may be promising, but it can not be treated as an "one size fits all" approach. I also believe that defecating is not just a necessity or a way of doing something, it has deep rooted philosophical and cultural annotations that are fundamental to the problems of defecating in the open, if this were not true, how else could we explain observations of people doing so despite having a toilet/ latrine within the household?" That is why I am beginning to think that this strategy leaves much to be desired. What's your take?

4. We can see some changes happening in South Asian countries. I work with soil department (erosin control and planning). I have witnessed some real changes in community toward open defecation as a result of community work.