Institute of Development Studies

Scaling up Community Led Total Sanitation

Robert Chambers and Petra Bongartz - 23 December 2008

As the International Year of Sanitation draws to a close, a conference at IDS from 16-18 December brought together professionals from around the world to share research and insights on Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).

The conference was the culmination of an IDS-led research project, funded by DFID, into how CLTS has been and can be scaled-up. Over the past two and a half years, IDS researchers Lyla Mehta, Robert Chambers and Petra Bongartz have worked on this project together with Kamal Kar, who pioneered CLTS in Bangladesh and partners in Bangladesh, India and Indonesia.

CLTS is an innovative approach in which communities mobilise themselves to take their own action to end open defecation. The conference presented an opportunity to examine the diversity of experiences with CLTS and to explore the next steps.

Read Julia Day’s blog and see images from the conference at The Crossing, the blog for the STEPS Centre.

What is the CLTS approach?

CLTS was developed by Kamal Kar in Bangladesh in late 1999, and has since spread to other countries in South Asia – India, Pakistan and Nepal, in Southeast Asia – Indonesia and Cambodia, the Middle East – Yemen, South America – Bolivia, and most recently Africa – including Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Zambia.

At the heart of CLTS lies the recognition that in the past many sanitation projects were unsuccessful because they assumed that providing subsidised latrines would result in improved sanitation and hygiene. The failure of these traditional approaches shows that merely building toilets does not guarantee their use. In contrast, CLTS focuses on the behaviour change that needs to occur in order to ensure real and sustainable improvements to sanitation – investing in community mobilisation instead of hardware and shifting the focus from toilet construction for individual households to the creation of ‘open defecation free’ villages.

With CLTS people carry out their own analysis, realising for themselves that as long as even a minority continues to defecate in the open, all are eating one another’s shit (the crude local word is always used), and everyone is at risk of disease. In this way CLTS triggers the community’s desire for change, propels them into action and encourages innovation, mutual support and appropriate local solutions, thus leading to greater ownership and sustainability.

The challenges for CLTS

The conference learnt of remarkable progress towards communities becoming ODF in parts of a number of countries, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Zambia. There was also an open and honest discussion of the problems that have been thrown up. These included: how to support and verify the inclusion of the poorest and most marginalised; social, physical and ecological sustainability; the safe confinement of children’s faeces; financing, rewards and incentives; and quality and style of training. How to go to scale with quality was an overarching and recurrent theme throughout the conference.

Almost every panellist highlighted that communities are not homogeneous, and that race, gender, ethnicity and class can be significant axes of difference. Achieving ODF conditions requires acceptance and participation by everyone in a community. Care is needed to ensure that CLTS reaches those who are poorest and most marginalised and that these groups don’t become more stigmatised in the process.

Constructive ideas were put forward on how to tackle this and other issues. Continued networking and exchange of experiences were seen as essential. Key areas for innovation and learning were identified, among them: how to sustain ODF conditions once they have been achieved; the role of children and schools; integration and collaboration with other approaches to sanitation and hygiene; and policy advocacy in working with donors and governments. Learning alliances of organisations and individuals were agreed to be a promising way forward.

The conference closed on a positive note, with understanding of the variety of different positions and of the importance of mutual respect and honesty in moving forward and identifying what best to do.

Next steps for IDS

IDS will continue to work on CLTS. Findings from the current research project will be widely disseminated early in 2009. Under a new Irish Aid-funded project, IDS researchers Robert Chambers and Petra Bongartz will work together with Kamal Kar on action learning and networking and Lyla Mehta will explore opportunities for future research. This new project will include continuing to build a global network for sharing and learning to improve practice and policy around CLTS.

Robert Chambers is a Research Fellow and Petra Bongartz is Coordination, Communication and Networking Officer at the Institute of Development Studies

Image: Petra Bongartz