The CLTS Foundation Global team in partnership with UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office ( ESARO) has been invited by the Government of Eritrea to conduct a refresher training, ODF protocol development and also to implement a diagnostic tool called CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP) from 13 Feb to 17 Feb 2017 in Eritrea to review the status and quality of CLTS.

CRAP will provide a quick assessment of the health of the CLTS programme delivered at large scale in the country. The quality of implementation of CLTS on the ground varies immensely from country to country in the region. CRAP involves a series of participatory exercises involving stakeholders at the national, regional and district levels to analyze and reflect on their country’s sanitation program. The tool is designed to identify the strengths and gaps existing in the current implementation process and made the necessary rectifications to improve the programme.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) was adopted by the Government of Eritrea in its national policy in late 2007. Prior to the introduction of the community led approach, the focus of sanitation interventions carried out in the country focused on producing “high end” toilets with a subsidy that included five bags of cement, iron bars for reinforcement, vent pipes and re-useable moulds for the floor slab. As funds were limited and families were waiting for subsidies, very few toilets were built and the usage of the constructed latrines was very less.

The adoption of the CLTS approach created a shift in hygiene and sanitation promotion. Consequently, a considerable amount of capacity building through training was done for all stakeholders at various levels. Regional advocacy workshops on CLTS were carried out in six regions between July 2008 and February 2009. These were attended by more than 400 participants (including regional governors, sub-regional administrators, higher government officials, religious leaders, regional assembly members and implementers of sanitation programmes). In early 2009, the Ministry of Health, through their Environmental Health Unit, was ready to scale up CLTS and launched a nationwide sanitation programme with the assistance of UNICEF in 46 villages.

Kamal Kar, the Chairman of CLTS Foundation Global visited Eritrea in June 2009 during which he carried out a review of the programme as well as advocacy to strengthen CLTS in the country. During his mission, a week-long national “hands-on” CLTS ToT training for 46 participants (Public Health Technicians, Sanitarians, community Integrated Management of Child Illnesses (IMCI) focal persons and nurses) from all over the country was conducted. As of May 2014, 869 villages out of 2,644 have been triggered in the six regions of the country with 489 villages (18 % of the rural villages) already declared Open Defecation Free. Since 2007 when the CLTS approach was introduced in Eritrea, 146,700 households (or an estimated 733,000 people, 31 % of the rural population) have stopped open defecation in all the six regions of the country. The National Rural Sanitation Policy and Strategy Direction was launched in October 2009 and this policy fully supports the CLTS approach.

It is hoped that the refresher training, ODF Protocol and the administration of the CRAP tool by the sanitation teams in Eritrea will pave the way forward to enhance implementation and scale up the programme towards national ODF status.

The post Boosting sanitation progress and initiation of CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP) in Eritrea appeared first on CLTS Foundation Global.

CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP)

Methodology & Sharing Country Experiences from the Region

UNICEF Eastern and Southern Regional Office (ESARO) and CLTS Foundation Global are jointly organising a CRAP tool regional workshop at ‘SAN LEARN 2016 – Sanitation Learning Workshop’ at Johannesburg, South Africa from 10-12 May, 2016.

SAN LEARN 2016 – Sanitation Learning Workshop, South Africa. Photo Credit: Amit Sengupta / CLTS Foundation Global

In this 3-day SANLEARN workshop, CLTS Foundation Global is playing a vital role by facilitating a one full day session on CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP) on 11^th May. This is a unique tool developed by CLTS Foundation Global and UNICEF ESARO to assess the status and quality of community-led total sanitation in any community, country or region in a quick and comprehensive manner.

The three-day regional level conference by UNICEF ESARO at Johannesburg aims to bring in at least 70-80 senior practitioners working on sanitation from UNICEF and government officials from at least 20 different countries from eastern and southern regions of Africa to exchange experiences of implementing and scaling up sanitation initiatives in their respective countries.

FAQs on CRAP:

What is the CRAP Tool?

The CLTS Rapid Appraisal Protocol (CRAP) is a diagnostic tool to assess the status and quality of CLTS (Community Led Total Sanitation) in any particular country. The tool reviews the present practice of CLTS at the national and sub-national/regional level through a rapid appraisal, which means that it is administered in a quick and comprehensive manner using participatory approaches. Through a series of exercises, all the major sanitation actors in a country are involved in a reflective process, to identify the strengths and gaps existing in the current programme, and think of ways to take sanitation initiatives to scale with quality.

READ the FULL CRAP Brochure HERE

Why CRAP?

Since its inception in 1999-2000, CLTS has spread rapidly in more than 65 countries globally. Of these, more than 35 countries in the continent of Africa have rolled out CLTS as a strategy to achieve their national sanitation goals, with at least 20 of them adopting the approach in their national sanitation policy. However, there is a wide variation in the quality and scale of implementation of CLTS in these countries based on varying resource capacities, quality of CLTS facilitation, degree of political will, and institutional mind-sets and attitudes, among other factors. Additionally, experiences during the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era have shown that while countries have been able to achieve small islands of success, the real challenge has been in scaling it up to achieve open defecation free (ODF) districts or regions or countries. The conceptualization of the CRAP tool emerged from the need to address these challenges, as countries embrace new and ambitious goals at the onset of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era. CRAP is therefore a simple tool with a methodology that is easy to administer in order to achieve a common basic standard of CLTS implementation across different countries.

6 Pillars of CRAP

6 Pillars of CRAP. Copyright: CLTS Foundation Global and UNICEF ESARO

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The post Let’s Talk CRAP appeared first on CLTS Foundation Global.