The Ministry of Rural Development, Royal Government of Cambodia and CLTS Foundation Global in association with Plan International, Cambodia  are jointly hosting a Regional conference  ‘From Communities to ODF Nations: Fast tracking ODF South East Asia’ in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on 15-17 November 2017. The conference will be inaugurated by the Deputy Prime Minister, Royal Government of Cambodia, His Excellency, Dr. Yim Chhayly. The Deputy Prime Minister is expected to welcome the congregation of more than 100 international delegates from South Asia, South East Asia and the Pacific regions. The conference will witness the active participation of development partners such as SNV, WSSCC, Cambodia, Water Aid and UNICEF along with sanitation experts from the governments, UN agencies, INGOs and other key stakeholders from the region.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) has been instrumental in enhancing sanitation access for millions of people, especially the rural population, across the developing world, during the past two decades. By the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) period, CLTS was institutionalised in the national sanitation policy of more than 35 nations and rolled out as the key implementation strategy in over 65 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific regions.

While significant progress has been achieved in the East and South East Asia and the Pacific region, an estimated 659 million people continue to remain without access to improved sanitation, and 83 million people in the region still practice open defecation.[1] This conference aims to address critical questions towards meeting the SDG goal 6.2 of universal sanitation such as: What lessons do South East Asia’s (Cambodia, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Vietnam,  Indonesia, The Philippines etc.)? What does the MDG experience in sanitation hold for achieving an ODF South East Asia region by 2030? What were the crucial factors for success and failure in sanitation programming across the different nations? What are the key challenges that the respective countries face going forward? What are the critical building blocks for scaling up sanitation in the region?

Deliberations from this conference will be applied to develop a roadmap and action plan for the region towards achieving ODF nations in the next few years.

Dates: 15-16-17 November

Venue: Phonm Penh, Cambodia

For more information, please contact:

Amit Sengupta

Communications Manager

CLTS Foundation Global

Email: amit@cltsfoundation.org

www.cltsfoundation.org

Skype: amitmishti

Mobile: +91-9717984406

[1] https://www.unicef.org/eapro/Second_Review_of_Community_Led_Total_Sanitation_in_East_Asia_and_Pacific.pdf

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CLTS Foundation Global recently held a capacity building workshop at the 40th WEDC International Conference, UK on the CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP) – a tool developed jointly by CLTS Foundation Global and the UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office over the last two years.

As part of the team that developed the tool and administered the same in different countries to field test its applicability, I was delighted to lead this workshop with other colleagues at this conference. CRAP is a tool that can be effectively applied in country contexts to assess the overall status of CLTS programming in the respective country. The tool application involves stakeholder consultations at different administrative and governance levels – national, regional and local – as an essential step towards understanding if the national policy and programming aspects of CLTS implementation in a country are sufficiently aligned at the policy and programme intervention levels at regional and local levels to produce results on the ground. This also helps in identifying critical building blocks of the programme in terms of strengths and gaps which can be used to design a way forward to expand the coverage, scale and effectiveness of the programme.

The workshop witnessed participation from government officials, sanitation experts, M&E specialists, NGO practitioners, researchers and academics across policy and programmatic functions from different countries. An active discussion and rich sharing of global sanitation experiences during the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) period from countries such as Mozambique, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Kenya, Nepal and India among others highlighted the need for the development of a tool like CRAP. CLTS emerged as a radical new approach in the year 2000 shifting sanitation policy and programmatic focus from top down toilet construction approaches to community led solutions and local collective action that was successful in achieving sustainable results in sanitation. The ability of the approach to achieve clear sanitation and hygiene outcomes within a quick timeframe with limited resources contributed to its popularity and uptake by national governments and development agencies across more than 70 countries around the developing world during the MDG period.

While CLTS pilot projects demonstrated success in terms of achieving open defecation free (ODF) communities, there were several challenges in scaling up the approach and achieving success at a district, regional and national level. It was becoming increasingly clear that the achievement of ODF and post ODF solutions at a larger scale demanded the involvement of a diverse set of actors outside of the community such as government stakeholders and ministries, even those who did not have the primary mandate to implement sanitation; and non-government organisations such as development partners, private sector, civil society, academia and media. Achieving ODF districts, regions and nations required multi layered advocacy strategies and triggering of behaviour change across different levels of institutional actors. Moreover, it was observed that there was wide variation in the implementation of CLTS not just across countries but across partner programmes in the same country and even among different country programmes of the same organisation. The development of the CRAP tool was necessitated in this context in order to set a basic minimum standard for CLTS programme implementation and ensure that critical elements are in place to scale up the programme.

The participants were involved in a simulation exercise to orient them on the steps involved in the CRAP application. The group was given a case study of a country sanitation context and each participant was given the role of a stakeholder covering both government and non-government sectors. The participants actively participated in a consultation exercise, which provided them an overall understanding of the tool application process, while giving them a hands-on experience on how to facilitate some of the tools.

Using participatory tools, the participants explored key areas of enquiry under the six key pillars which encompass the critical building blocks essential for scaling up any CLTS programme. During the consultation exercise, the first pillar – Policy, Roadmap and Directives- highlighted if there was an enabling environment and institutional support essential to implement CLTS and take it to scale in the country. Key questions were directed towards assessing if CLTS was part of national rural sanitation policy, if policy was translated into an operational roadmap and whether political buy in and leadership at all levels were in place to drive CLTS in the country at different levels of governance. The second pillar – Financial Planning and Budgeting – looked at the issue of adequate financial resources and planning processes that enable CLTS to translate from national strategies into operational plans at various levels. The pillar – CLTS Protocol or Guidelines – reviewed the quality of the national CLTS protocol in place and whether it was harmonized across partners and applied consistently across the country during triggering, verification and certification processes with due consideration for regional specificities. While the fourth pillar – Partnerships and Capacity – enquired if there were adequate number of actors in place with sufficient capacity and the convergence essential to achieve the national reach and quality needed for the CLTS program, the fifth pillar – Monitoring and Coordination – probed the existence of mechanisms to systematically capture process, outcome and impact data at various levels. It also looked at how data is coordinated and organized across various levels to provide feedback for CLTS programming and leadership. The last pillar – Post-ODF Sustainability – captured the extent of private sector involvement and sanitation marketing strategies to achieve sustainability in behaviour change and sanitation facilities.

As feedback of the tool, the participants shared that the effectiveness of the CRAP tool process lies in its potential to involve key sanitation actors as active analysts in the implementation of a country sanitation programme: to understand the health and status of CLTS, and identify key drivers to develop a roadmap for an ODF nation – this ensures that the key actors take ownership of the recommendations and action plan emerging from this exercise.

For more details on the CRAP tool, you can refer to the upcoming publication:
Kamal Kar, Sisir Pradhan, Preetha Prabhakaran, Ann Thomas, Peter Harvey (forthcoming): CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP) – A tool for rapid assessment of the practice of CLTS at scale, UNICEF and CLTS Foundation Global, 2017

Acknowledgement:
The CRAP tool workshop was facilitated by Preetha Prabhakaran and Joydeep Dutta (CLTS Foundation Global) with support from Dr Andrew Cotton (WEDC University, Loughborough) and Dr Mansoor Ali ( UK WASH Network)

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By Kamal Kar

It was indeed a great pleasure to attend and participate in a conference co-hosted by CLTS Knowledge Hub at IDS and UNICEF, held at Tagatay. This enlightening conference was followed by a National workshop entitled, ‘Accelerating Sustainable Zero Open Defecation Programming: Supporting the Poorest and Most Vulnerable’ in Manila. It was an enriching experience to meet and interact with CLTS champions from the Philippines and other South East Asian countries.

At the outset, I was rather intrigued by the name of the first workshop, ‘Supporting the Poorest and Most Vulnerable Workshop’ and wondered who was going to provide support to the excluded poor and vulnerable. As I continued my train of thought, I assumed that the workshop would deal with the question of those families/households who had returned to the practise of Open Defecation, post achievement of the ODF status by the community.

As a participant of the two notable events mentioned above, I thought of documenting my initial thoughts and reflections. The major discussions of the workshop revolved around the element of financial inability of the poorest families to continue good sanitation behaviour and improve their toilets to make them more durable and finally, sustain the behaviour change aimed at ending Open Defecation, once achieved.

Also Read: Philippines aims to become Open Defecation Free by 2022 | Manila Conference

The participants at the Tagatay workshop included program managers, CLTS consultants and academics. Though the workshop witnessed the presence of some practitioners, I was a bit disappointed to note that the Natural Leaders and Community Consultants who had emerged from the different ODF villages and had ascended to become significant figures in the civil society and held important positions in the respective local governments, were absent from the workshop. Personally, I am of the opinion that these individuals who are spread in countries where CLTS has been introduced and implemented across the world, are the real storehouse of knowledge and can shed a distinct light on the various reasons and circumstances which compel the poorest families to return to the practice of Open Defecation, even after they had stopped this age old habit and changed their hygiene behaviour. They also could inform all about the diversified efforts taken by the communities in order to arrest such slippage for the maintenance of ODF status.

ODF Sustainability and Global Experience: Bangladesh, Madagascar, Nepal

Global experience has demonstrated that it is rather difficult and rare for families to revert to the practice of Open Defecation, after changing and sustaining their hygiene behaviour practice for a period of 6 months or more. Inspirational examples have emerged from poor countries like Bangladesh, Madagascar and Nepal among others, where ODF communities regularly reconstruct their toilets after the conclusion of periodic environmental disasters like cyclones, flooding, heavy rains, etc. which results in significant loss and destruction of existing sanitation facilities.

In 2004, a BBC documentary entitled ‘Clean Living Part I’ captured the sanitation innovations made by extremely poor communities in Haor region in Bajitpur district of Bangladesh. These low lying areas are spread across six districts and mainly comprise of rural population. Inundation and water logging is a regular phenomenon in these regions and it occurs almost annually for a period of 6 months. The documentary explained how the poor communities living in these regions of Bangladesh have made necessary and novel sanitation provisions.

In the year 2003, a field team from CARE, Bangladesh and I introduced CLTS in the first village of Bajitpur district and in a short span of two years, all the villages of the Haor region became ODF. Till date, I have never witnessed the spread of CLTS at such a stimulating speed, in any other part of the world.

After understanding the implications of living in unsanitary conditions, the communities soon innovated and introduced localised solutions to tackle the sanitation concerns. The Haor region is a single cropped area and the poverty and prosperity of the communities principally depends on the onset of inundation of these low lying areas. The members of these communities create and use temporary housing and toilet structures at the low level plain for 6 months during the dry season. On the other hand, the communities have constructed proper houses and permanent toilets with better superstructure using CGI seats and bricks, well placed squatting plates, soak pit tanks, on a higher plain known as ‘anti’.

These toilets are utilised only during the wet season when all of these families temporarily migrate to the higher ground ‘antis’ and the toilets below are destroyed due to inundation. After 6 months, when the lowland dries up, the community consultants with the help of the community build new low cost, temporary toilets for the next wet season. The central idea remains minimizing the use of highland toilets by using the lowland temporary toilets during the dry season to maximize its use during the wet season. This seasonal usage tendency allows the upland toilet pits to dry up during the dry season and enriches the soil with nutrients through conversion and assimilation of the excreta at the lower areas into mud, silt, clay during the 6 month wet season. Similar strategy is used by millions of families along the ‘chaurs’ and coastal and saline riverside areas of Bangladesh in districts of Barishal, Pabna, Faridpur, Noakhali, Lal Munir Hath and Tangail as they face the same phenomenon of inundation and land erosion, periodically almost every year. Though their sanitation approach may be perceived as temporary and unlike the usual toilet construction notion, it successfully manages to disconnect oral and faecal contamination and provide multiple health benefits to all in the community. After vast areas of Bangladesh became ODF, many of these communities continued to engage with the local government and other support agencies in order to evolve innovative ways for management of feacal sludge.

Another poignant example of poor communities handling sanitation crisis was witnessed after the devastating earthquake in Nepal in the districts of Sindhupal Chawk and Dolakha where thousands of rural households in these areas suffered the loss of their houses, including the constructed toilets. It was heartening to note that as soon as the debris was removed and normalcy started creeping into the lives of the people, the families of the ODF communities constructed their toilets first, before addressing other issues related to construction of civil structure. This provided a clear indication that when behaviour change is deeply ingrained and becomes a common practise; no one tends to revert to the practise of Open Defecation.

This realization brings forth a question regarding the quality of CLTS triggering, post triggering follow-up and post ODF support, rendered to a community. Moreover, the enabling environment in which CLTS is introduced becomes a crucial determinant of behaviour change sustenance. For instance, if information about the element of externally designed support to the poorest is in some way divulged to the community at the introductory stage of CLTS, it would be impossible to create community dynamics which will embrace all members and strive towards achieving ODF status. The usual tendency of families trying to prove themselves eligible for external dole on the basis of low economic status becomes a hindering factor in community-led movements. Creating and maintaining community social solidarity can easily resolve such challenges.

One of the infamous examples of alluring the community towards a substantial reward upon achievement of the ODF status is the Nirmal Gram Puraskar program, launched by Government of India. A colossal number of villages and blocks falsely declared themselves ODF with the intention of acquiring the prize money. Soon, the false declarations and pseudo-ODF achievements were exposed and the government was compelled to abandon the program.

Though, it is possible for a small percentage of an ODF community to slip back into the practice of Open Defecation due to loss of their low-cost sanitation structures which were initially made from locally available, inexpensive materials or owing to the inability of the poorest family members to move along the sanitation ladder by constructing more durable toilets as carried out by others in the community, experience has shown otherwise. Evidence has demonstrated that it is quite organic and rational for the communities to maintain their ODF status for a period of minimum 1-2 years, after the achievement and declaration.

It is really difficult to imagine that any human being, be it poor, rich, educated, not-so-educated, irrespective of their class, caste, creed or livelihood pattern would accept to go back to the unhygienic and filthy habit of Open Defecation, after achieving ODF status. This refusal to live in an unhealthy environment becomes the cornerstone of behaviour change and the basis for sustained ODF status.

Please refer to the following diagrams which explain the distinction between the phenomenon of interactive participation and self mobilization which is generated through CLTS triggering and sustained through post ODF follow-up on one hand, while on the other, shallow understanding and incomplete CLTS triggering which is often reflected in participation aimed at gaining material incentives or functional participation.

Creative designed by CLTS Foundation Global

Through global experiences, the notion that sustainability cannot be achieved unless behaviour change is preserved and practised for a certain period of time has become sacrosanct. An attempt at bypassing the community’s own social solidarity mechanisms or denying the involvement of the local formal and informal actors who were instrumental in achieving ODF status could be detrimental to the community led process. Therefore, targeting of the poorest of the poor and extending externally recognized support to this section of the community for toilet construction might damage the confidence of the community and push them back to external dependence again. The sporadic attempts at wanting to identify the poorest and the most vulnerable through an outsider’s perspective to provide them with externally planned resources in the plea of “leaving no one behind” would severely damage the organically grown social solidarity mechanism and community empowerment process of CLTS.

Check out CLTS Foundation Global’s You Tube channel at this link. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZBczl2AIevTqfZWbKTi0Fg

The author is pioneer of community led total sanitation and recipient of Sarphati Lifetime Achievement Award in Sanitation 2015. He is the founder chairman of CLTS Foundation Global. 

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