Meanwhile, at refugee camps like Zaatari in Jordan, people walk miles and wait in endless lines to use unsanitary facilities, raising the possibility of disease. The situation is worse for girls and young women, who risk being attacked using communal toilets late at night. Currently, UNICEF and its implementing partners are responding to the WASH needs of Syrian refugees in the Zaatari Refugee Camp. (Picture on left: Building new toilet blocks at Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan, Photo Courtesy: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam)

Merriam Webster defines an emergency as an unexpected and usually dangerous situation that calls for immediate action. Armed conflicts, floods, droughts, earthquakes are some of the major causes of emergency situations. People caught in such humanitarian situations are much more vulnerable to diseases, often caused by lack of sanitation, inadequate water supply and deplorable hygiene. Increased risk of disease also arises from overcrowding, exposure to new pathogens and the disruption of routine and safe habits. Diarrhoea, cholera and other infectious diseases transmitted from faeces to mouth are the some of the most severe health problems.

Current approaches to WASH during Emergencies

The main objective of any WASH intervention during emergencies is to reduce the transmission of faecal-oral diseases and exposure to disease-bearing vectors. Approaches to WASH in emergencies may vary according to need, culture, context and the nature of the disaster or conflict. In Yemen, WHO and other partners are involved in efforts which include strengthening disease surveillance; supporting operations in diarrhoeal treatment centres and oral rehydration corners; training the health workforce on case management; deploying rapid response teams; and improving the availability of safe water and sanitation.  Meanwhile, one of the major WASH activities undertaken in Zaatari Camp by UNICEF is the supply of some 3,800 cubic meters of safe water on a daily basis. This water supply is done through water trucking from two internal boreholes (operated by UNICEF) and a number of external boreholes (owned and operated by private individuals).

However, certain basic standards and protocols are maintained during emergency response by various organisations. The Sphere Handbook is one of the most widely known and internationally recognized sets of common principles and universal minimum standards in humanitarian response. The Sphere movement was started in 1997 by a group of humanitarian organisations aiming to improve the quality of humanitarian response.

The term ‘sanitation’, throughout the Sphere handbook, refers to excreta disposal, vector control, solid waste disposal and drainage. The Sphere Minimum Standards believe that providing sufficient water and sanitation facilities is not enough to ensure their optimal use or impact on public health. Thus, in order to achieve the maximum benefit from a WASH response, it is desirable to ensure that disaster-affected people have the necessary information, knowledge and understanding to prevent water and sanitation-related disease. These Minimum Standards in Sphere Handbook also urge humanitarian organisations to involve the affected people in the design and maintenance of WASH facilities. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Oxfam, Plan International and Save the Children are some of the organisations which adhere to the Minimum Standards set out in the SPHERE charter.

WASH innovations for Emergencies

When we hear the term ‘innovation’ in WASH we think of a new design of a toilet or other hardware innovations. But, innovation is not limited to hardware but it also involves software, especially for WASH interventions during emergencies which are complex in nature. Some of the hardware and software innovations for WASH during and post-emergencies are:

Tiger Worm Toilet 

Tiger worm toilets which turn human waste into fertilizer could prove to be an affordable and sustainable sanitation solution for increasingly crowded refugee camps. In the conventional twin pit toilet, the decomposition process to turn human waste into compost takes about two years after closing of the pit. But in the tiger worm toilet the earthworms decompose human waste in a faster manner and the waste is converted into vermin-compost in about 60 days. The tiger worm toilets were first deployed by Oxfam in slums in the Liberian capital of Monrovia in 2013, and have since been installed in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Myanmar.

Zimba water purifier

Zimba is a low-cost device that automatically mixes chlorine into water in the correct proportion, regardless of the flow rate of the water. It does not require electricity, no expensive cartridges and uses only gravity to operate. As opposed to conventional water purifiers, a Zimba can handle thousands of litres per day and is therefore able to supply more people with their clean water needs. Last November, Zimba purifiers were installed in Rohingya refugee camps at Cox’s Bazaar by Environmental Interventions Unit of Infectious Diseases Division at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh.

SuperTowel

SuperTowel is a reusable and highly durable towel that includes a permanently bonded anti-microbial layer. It is designed to provide clean hands without using soap and using only a small amount of water.  The SuperTowel project is supported by Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund programme, a grant making facility supporting organisations and individuals to identify, nurture and share innovative and scalable solutions to the most pressing challenges facing effective humanitarian assistance.

CLTS during emergencies and fragile-contexts

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is an innovative methodology for mobilising communities to completely eliminate open defecation by means of collective behaviour change. Communities are facilitated to conduct their own appraisal and analysis of open defecation and take their own action to become open-defecation free (ODF). CLTS is spread across 70 countries in South and South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America and at least 35 countries have CLTS as part of their national policies.

During more than 20 years of civil conflict in Somalia, sanitation interventions were mostly limited to construction of emergency latrines for affected populations or education on sanitation and hygiene (using the Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST) approach) followed by fully subsidised latrine programmes for selected households. However, there was little evidence that these interventions achieved the desired results as surveys in Somalia showed that access to sanitation decreased between 1995 and 2012. With this in mind, UNICEF WASH team in Somalia decided to introduce CLTS.

The CLTS intervention by UNICEF was very successful and Somalia went from zero ODF villages to 144 (self-declared) ODF villages by August 2014.  According to a UNICEF field note, the weak or absent government engagement on sanitation in fragile states and insecure environments could be considered as an enabling factor for CLTS, since government support for latrine subsidies had worked against CLTS in other countries.

Picture Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfam/8488403593/in/photostream/

The post Human Rights Day: WASH during Emergencies appeared first on CLTS Foundation Global.

Bill Gates 

August 23, 2012

 This was the brief given to applicants of Reinvent the Toilet Challenge initiated by the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene programme of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2011. The mission of this challenge: To bring sustainable sanitation solutions to more than 2.5 billion people worldwide.

From drinking a glass of water made from treated human waste to bringing a jar of human poop to the recent Reinvented Toilet Expo in China, Bill Gates has done it all to raise awareness about the problem. Such acts may seem outrageous to some, but the world needs such commitment as we are running out of time. Today, 4.5 billion people live without a safe toilet and 892 million people still practise open defecation. A single gram of human feces can contain 10 million viruses and one million bacteria, but in most countries of the global south, human faeces, on a massive scale, is not being treated safely. In such a situation, untreated human feces gets into our food chain and degrades ecosystems. To make this crisis worse, extreme weather events which include unprecedented droughts and floods pose a major risk to our fragile sanitation systems.

The good news is, Bill Gates belongs to a rare club of philanthropists with a profound commitment to bring sustainable sanitation to those who don’t have access to it. Financially, this commitment has translated into more than $200 million investments from the Gates Foundation over the last seven years and he plans to invest more to bring these solutions to the mainstream.

 The ‘Reinvented Toilets’

At the recent Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, a range of companies from around the world came together to display a new generation of non-seweredsanitation solutions that could eliminate harmful pathogens and convert human feces into viable by-products – clean water, fuel and fertilizer.In this expo, Indian companies such as, Eram Scientific, Ankur Scientific and Tide Technocrats displayed their reinvented toilets and small-scale waste treatment plants, which are now ready for sale to municipal and private entities.Some of the winning innovations around the globe which have been funded by the Reinvented Toilet Challenge are:

• California Institute of Technology, USA: CalTechh as developed a self-contained, solar-powered toilet and wastewater treatment system. A solar panel produces enough power for an electrochemical reactor that is designed to break down water and human waste. Excess power can be stored to provide energy for night-time operation or for use under low-sunlight conditions.
• Cranfield University, UK: Cranfield developed a prototype toilet that removes water from human waste and vapourizes it using a hand-operated vacuum pump and a unique membrane system. The remaining solids are turned into fuel that can also be used as fertiliser. The water vapour is then condensed and can be used for washing, or irrigation.
• Loughborough University, UK: The team from Loughborough University has been developing a toilet that transforms feces into biological charcoal (biochar) through hydrothermal carbonization (decomposition at high temperatures in water without oxygen) of fecal sludge. The system will be powered from heat generated by combusting the biochar and will recover water and salts from the feces and urine it produces.

To most of us, these innovations sound like expensive gadgets from science fiction movies.  Even Bill Gates admits “it will be at least a decade” before the reinvented toilets reach tens of millions of people in the poorest areas, and they will have to prove both practical and economical.

Which brings us to an important fact. Hardware innovations are not enough to ensure universal sanitation.

CLTS: A proven approach from the global south

While admitting that there has been limited hardware innovations in the sanitation sector, we have to keep in mind that ‘software’ i.e. behaviour change approaches are important for adoption and ownership of toilets. One of the most successful approaches is Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), whichhas been rolled out in more than 70 countries worldwide. Itis one of the most successful approaches in the development sector with roots in the global south.  Pioneered by Dr Kamal Kar in Bangladesh, CLTS is an innovative approachfor empowering communitiesto completely eliminateopen defecation. It focuses on igniting a change in collective sanitation behaviour, which is achieved through a process of collective local action stimulated by facilitators from within or outside the community. As an approach, CLTS has proved that with the right ‘triggers’ and enabling environment communities will take charge and build their own toilets.

The core philosophy of CLTS is : ‘no human being, rich or poor, wants to live in shit’. Affordable reinvented toilets which can be deployed at scale will be successful if they get this basic philosophy right. The Indian story till now has demonstrated that investing millions through a top-down hardware approach to end open defecation is bound to result in failure.There are hopes that Swachh Bharat Mission might have succeeded in building a sanitation movement among the masses, but building toilets for every household is not enough, communities should continue using these toilets without slipping back to old habits.

Thus, reinvented toilets could play a major role when communities which have lived without access to basic sanitation climb up the sanitation ladder and are ready to adopt these new technologies. However, private companies, NGOs,  national and local governments which are/will be involved in rolling out these reinvented toilets must keep in mind that only a toilet that is ‘desired’ will be a toilet used and ‘owned’.

References:

Bill Gates: Complete speech from Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Speeches/2018/11/Reinvented-Toilet-Expo

Water, sanitation & hygiene: Reinvent the toilet challenge fact sheet

https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/Fact_Sheet_Reinvent_the_Toilet_Challenge.pdf

The post World Toilet Day: How can ‘Reinvented Toilets’ address the global sanitation crisis? appeared first on CLTS Foundation Global.

On October 2^nd, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the mammoth Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) with the promise to make India open defecation free (ODF) by 2019. Along with providing government funding, the SBM also sought active participation from the corporate sector to tackle the issue. To this end it launched the Swachh Bharat Kosh (fund) “to facilitate channelisation of philanthropic contributions and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds”. Companies responded with enthusiasm; many did so because of Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013, which introduced mandatory CSR, to contribute to the campaign. Total fund mobilised under Swachh Bharat Kosh (SBK) as on January 31, 2016 stood at Rs 369.74 crore.

Now, a recent report ‘CSR in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) – What are India’s Top Companies up to?’ by the India Sanitation Coalition(ISC) and Samhita Social Ventures sheds some light on the nature of intervention by companies. The findings give interesting insights into how companies perceive their CSR investments in WASH.

Are current CSR investments making India ‘Swachh’?

The study selected 100 companies with the largest CSR budgets on the BSE 500. 90% of these 100 companies reported at least one CSR intervention in WASH over the last three years, with a total of 164 programs carried out.

Source

But, this report gives a bleak picture. It says, “Despite compelling evidence that the construction of toilets alone cannot eliminate open defecation, 75% companies were supporting programs related to creating infrastructure, such as the construction of toilets and water facilities, with little focus on programs aimed at influencing behaviour. Underlying reasons for this could include perceiving behaviour change programs as high risk due to difficulties quantifying and measuring impact, the long gestation period required and a lack of knowledge combined with construction-oriented targets defined by the Government.”

A vast body of research in the past few years prove that one of the key reasons for high open defecation rates, particularly in rural India, is the lack of proper behaviour change interventions, especially collective behaviour change. The Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan had a budget outlay of Rs 4260 crore (http://www.gktoday.in/nirmal-bharat-abhiyan/), but at the end of the programme India still remained the country with the highest number of open defecators. The SQUAT survey findings by r.i.c.e. Institute also show that poverty is not the only thing that is holding rural households back from building toilets; large parts of the population do not seem to have as yet made the association between good health and using toilets.

CLTS and India Inc: Time to unleash the true potential of Community-Led Total Sanitation

Participants and Dr. Kamal Kar pledging to make Simikot in Nepal an ODF urban township. Photo: Amit Sengupta/CLTSFoundation

In the SDG era, companies can’t afford to waste their resources on toilets which will not be used. Posing beside newly built toilets could be a great photo-opportunity for companies, but they must keep in mind that the photos of defunct and unused toilets built by them could also be potentially damaging to their public image.

India Inc have to start thinking about their CSR in terms of ROI (return on investments), which in this case should be social, economic and health impact of their investments in WASH. If SBA is about behaviour change and not infrastructure then why is corporate India not following suit? Why are all monies being mobilised for constructing toilets? Or is India Inc suffering from the hangover of an incentive driven regime?

Also Read: Rural Sanitation Transformation in Himachal Pradesh

In the past two decades the CLTS (Community-led Total Sanitation) approach has firmly established its potential to create lasting social impact. It focuses on igniting a change in collective sanitation behaviour, which is achieved through a process of collective local action stimulated by facilitators from within or outside the community. CLTS involves no up-front, individual household hardware subsidy and does not prescribe latrine models. At the heart of CLTS lies the recognition that merely providing toilets does not guarantee their use, nor result in improved sanitation and hygiene. The success of this approach is evident by the scale of its spread. At present the approach has been rolled out in more than 65 countries and is in the national policy of more than 35 countries.

Facilitating session before CLTS triggering in Bangladesh which is an Open Defecation Free country. Photo courtesy: AD Roy/Care Bangladesh

It is indeed sad for India that such an approach which has been developed by an Indian national (Dr Kamal Kar) has been limited in its impact by myopic thinking.

The corporate sector in India is powerful and has been driven by innovation. It is led by business houses which are respected all over the world. We are half way through the programme period of the SBM and it’s a good tie for India Inc to pause and rethink strategies. There have been archipelagos of success of CLTS interventions which have to be replicated rapidly. For e.g.: In January 2005, the government of Himachal Pradesh formally approved a comprehensive new rural sanitation strategy for the state with every one of those features that CLTS adoption and scaling up seemed to require.

Also Read: Toilet subsidy is no solution to sanitation crisis: Sanan

From the middle of 2006, a new pro-active person was given a stable tenure as Secretary, Rural Development and Panchayati Raj in Himachal Pradesh. Seeing the success of CLTS in Mandi district and WSP’s persistent advocacy, he encouraged district level trainings and participated in workshops at both state and regional level. A state level rural sanitation review committee was set up in 2007. This enabled continued interaction and the evolution of an excellent monitoring system that helped track the CLTS effort across the state. The new monitoring system focused on the processes to create ODF villages instead of counting individual toilets and state expenditure on hardware. The officials responsible for programme implementation were no longer being held accountable for toilets constructed and funds disbursed. Instead they were answerable for the extent to which communities (local government) were being facilitated to undertake the responsibility communities had assumed for improving their own sanitation situation. The programme ran effectively in campaign mode and the results became clearly visible by 2010.

In recent times, Chhattisgarh has shown remarkable success. The state began the Swachh Bharat Mission on 2^nd October 2014 and at that time there were only 20 open defecation free villages throughout the state, but as of May 2016, there are 1644 ODF villages in the state. The state doesn’t give upfront incentives to the households for construction of toilets. There is flexibility in the policy and often it is upto the Village Water and Sanitation Committee to decide. The state of Chhattisgarh has focused on the communities rather than the individuals. As a result it’s not family, but a set of families in the Gram, village or in the Panchayats, which are important.

ALSO READ: Dr. M. Geetha: Creating an enabling environment to tackle open defecation in Chhattisgarh

Indian companies have the advantage of not being burdened by red-tapism internally, so they can move with speed. There are people and organisations in India who can work with companies to help them reframe their strategies to achieve the vision of an open defecation free India.

The question: Is India Inc ready, or will it wait for 2019 and see graveyards of unused toilets in Indian villages?

The clock is ticking.

The views expressed in the blog are of the author’s own, personal reflections. Community Led Total Sanitation Foundation is not responsible for the views expressed herewith.

The post Can India Inc unleash the true potential of CLTS to make a Swachh Bharat? appeared first on CLTS Foundation Global.