Institute of Development Studies

Spend less to achieve more – donors urged to rethink their mindsets and methods

Professor Robert Chambers is a Research Associate in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at IDS and works on Community-led Total Sanitation, a radical participatory approach to sanitation. He urges donors to spend less to achieve more and offers some ideas for action to be taken.

Water and sanitation are often put together. Water, and the ways of thinking and acting needed for water, then permeate and determine approaches to sanitation. For much urban and centralised water-borne sanitation this can make sense. For rural and decentralised sanitation it does not. However, in rural areas, often the same project staff are found working on both water and sanitation, and sanitation is the poor relation. Rural water often requires more technical inputs and more funds. Rural sanitation is often household sanitation and requires less, or none of these. Water and moreso sanitation benefit from participatory approaches, and these are inhibited by the common top-down donor driven target oriented pressures for disbursement.

This can become pathological. An example is provided by Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). This is a radical participatory approach in which mainly rural communities are facilitated to analyse their practice of open defaecation and its effects and through disgust and self-respect decide to take action to stop it. Typically this takes a matter of only weeks or months. CLTS started in Bangladesh and has been spread to other countries including India, Indonesia, Nepal and Cambodia, and it has recently been seeded in Latin America and Africa. The target is not total latrinisation but to become open defaecation free. Conditions are favourable for CLTS where open defaecation is widespread and there is no hardware subsidy programme.

Unfortunately, and with the sanitation MDG targets in mind, donors are pushing more and more money into sanitation. This can make sense for much urban sanitation. For dispersed, household and community level rural sanitation, it can do, and has done, much harm in inhibiting and preventing the spread of CLTS. NGOs that might have adopted and facilitated CLTS have adopted, continued and expanded hardware-oriented subsidised programmes, driven by the need to spend their budgets and to report on achievements which are then in terms of latrines constructed (not even latrines used). Total latrinisation, not total sanitation in the sense of being open defaecation free, is the target. Long experience has shown how flawed this approach is, but the big additonal budgets becoming available from donors are making it sustainable in the face of contrary experience and evidence.

The sad reality is that most of the huge potential of CLTS for enhancing the wellbeing and health, especially of women and children, but also of men, cannot be realised because of the well-meaning but misguided pressures within donor agencies to spend money, and to spend it in large amounts. One NGO that pioneered CLTS was distracted by a very large grant from a donor and then failed to continue its good work. In contrast the head of an NGO who converted to CLTS was immediately in trouble with his head office because he only spent 20 per cent of his annual budget - on facilitation and support, not on hardware, even though many times more people were served and benefitted from the sanitation being total.

The stakes are very, very high. The challenge is on the table for donors and policy makers to change their mindsets, methods and incentives, and spend less to achieve more.

These action points stand out:

• for donors and policymakers to gain field experience of CLTS so that they understand the need for restraint in spending
• in the many rural areas favourable for CLTS, for large hardware subsidy programmes to be withdrawn
• for small grants to be made, not large, for facilitation not hardware, and without targets for disbursement
• for open defaecation free status to be the criterion for assessment, not numbers of latrines constructed.

Further reading

Kar, K. (2003) 'Subsidy or Self-Respect. Participatory Total Community Sanitation in Bangladesh ', IDS Working Paper 184, Brighton: IDS

Kar, K. (2005) Practical Guide to Triggering Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), Participation Group IDS, Brighton: IDS

Kar, K., and Pasteur, K. (2005) 'Subsidy or Self-Respect? Participatory Total Community Sanitation. An Update on Recent Developments', IDS Working Paper 257, Brighton: IDS

Kar, K., and Bongartz, P. (2006) 'Update on Some Recent Developments in Community-Led Total Sanitation' (pdf 2.6MB), Update paper on IDS Working Paper 257, Brighton: IDS

Buy Robert Chambers' books online from the IDS bookshop

Chambers, R. (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First, New York: Longman

Chambers, R. (1993) Challenging the Professions: Frontiers for Rural Development, London: Intermediate Technology Publications

Chambers, R. (1997) Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last, London: Intermediate Technology Publications

Participatory Workshops (2002) Participatory Workshops: A Sourcebook of 21 Sets of Ideas and Activities, London: Earthscan

Chambers, R. (2005) Ideas for Development: Reflecting Forwards, London: Earthscan