Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is a grassroots approach to sanitation developed in Bangladesh and now active in more than 15 countries. It follows the philosophy of participatory rural appraisal, or PRA.

CLTS focuses on "triggering" communities to improve their own sanitation systems and become "Open Defecation Free" (ODF). The initial "triggering" is done by holding training sessions, transect walks (looking for areas where faeces are found and tracing their path into food and water supplies), meetings and activities for children and students. The idea is to involve the whole community, instil a sense of disgust at the practice of open defecation and enable the community to develop an action plan to end it. After the initial triggering, the community are left to construct their own latrines. No hardware or designs are provided, though advice and help in locating materials can be. After a while, external evaluators return to inspect the village and confirm whether it is indeed ODF. If so, a certification ceremony is held and neighbouring communities are invited to share good practice and put pressure on them to become ODF free as well. This sense of competition and collective pressure is also encouraged within villages, with neighbours encouraging each other to achieve the collective goal of ODF status. CLTS is a low-cost methodology requiring no hardware subsidy: the main input is good facilitation of the participatory process - the training of trainers and planning of programmes [1].

Background

CLTS was developed by Kamal Kar, an advocate of community participation in development, in Bangladesh. He has criticised the lack of success of NGO's in Bangladesh, saying "It is difficult to find even 100 villages among nearly 85,000 that are 100 per cent sanitised and free from open defecation." [2] He has also been involved in low cost sanitation programs. [3] Kamal Kar is a development consultant based in Kolkata, India, who has worked with many national and international agencies on innovative methodologies for development in Asia and Africa.

Kamal Kar introduced PRA (participatory rural appraisal) in 1993 (to Tanzania? Johansson, 2000). CLTS, (Community-led total sanitation) was developed in 2000 by Kar with his colleagues, WaterAid and Village Education Resources Centre (VERC) (a Bangladesh NGO).[4] (PLA Notes 49: Decentralisation and Community-based Planning, p31)


Monitoring via SMS

In October 2009 the Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing (TSSM) project piloted a service based on text messages (SMS) for sanitation monitoring system in East Java, Indonesia. The system is used to improve the flow of information about the CLTS triggering process from community to district level, to enable Indonesians to improve monitoring results of the CLTS program. [5]

Interwiki links

Wikipedia articles:

References

  1. ↑ [1], Kar and Chambers, 2008
  2. ↑ Water: either too much or too little, Environmental Articles Archive: Water Resources, July 2004.
  3. ↑ Habitat Debate, Volume 9, no. 3, September 2003.
  4. ↑ partner organizations listed under Acknowledgements, 2005, p19.
  5. ↑ Total Sanitation Progress via SMS in East Java. The project is funded by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank.

Further reading

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