The world of CLTS

Ah yes, another acronym. Welcome to the humanitarian world!

CLTS stands for Community-Led Total Sanitation.


It's been a stressful past week as we've had 36 people from 3 organisations and 4 government departments involved in CLTS training in Rumbek, and I was the lucky one to organise it all. It's basically been a week of running around dealing with logistical issues like cars, picking up people, meeting rooms, printing handouts, changing flights, paperwork for payment ... the list goes on It's been driving me mad, especially dealing with everyone's complaints and the trainer wanting to extend the training by another day which means changing all the bookings, having to fork out more money, doing all the requisition forms... blah blah blah. I've been so tired. So I'm just glad to have left, so that I don't have to do any more organising! But the paperwork trail will follow me unfortunately...


So, back to the subject at hand: CLTS. The approach was pioneered in 2000 by Dr. Kamal Kar (a development consultant from India) together with VERC (Village Education Resource Centre), a partner of WaterAid Bangladesh. It was piloted in Mosmoil, a village in the Rajshahi district of Bangladesh, whilst evaluating a traditionally subsidised sanitation program. 

Kar succeeded in persuading the local NGO to stop top-down (NGO to community) toilet construction through a subsidised approach (whereby the NGO contributes some of the materials/costs of latrine building, while the community plays their part through the contribution of small money, labour, materials etc). He advocated for a change in the usual institutional attitude, and the need to draw on intense local mobilisation and facilitation to enable villagers to analyse their sanitation and waste situation, and bring about collective decision-making to stop open defecation.


CLTS spread fast within Bangladesh where informal institutions and NGOs are key. Both Bangladeshi and international NGOs adopted the approach. The Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) of the World Bank played an important role in enabling spread to neighbouring India and then subsequently to Indonesia and parts of Africa. Today CLTS is in more than 20 countries in Asia , Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

CLTS is basically a no-subsidy approach - ie we don't provide anything except advice. We go to villages, mobilise the community, check out their sanitation/hygiene situation, map their villages on the ground using flour/ash/sawdust, and get them to take us around the village and show us all the places where people defecate (no-one has toilets so they just go in the bush).
 

The idea is that fear, shame and disgust are the tools to make people act. Without feeling embarrassed that they are all shitting around the village, and us shaming them into recognising that this is a really bad practice, they won't do anything about it. They always ask us to come and build latrines, health centres, pumps, schools etc but we go there with nothing and promise nothing. There is always the excuse that South Sudan is still recovering from war, but when we ask them if they want to continue to live like this, of course none of them do!

Most interesting is that we bring a big, steaming (or fly-infested) human turd that we find on the community walk, and put it in the middle of the circle where everyone can see it. They HATE it. Absolutely HATE IT.
Then we do some demonstrations (ie mixing shit with water and asking people to drink it) and putting a bowl of food next to the shit, to show the flies moving from one to the other. This show that they are basically eating and drinking their own shit (ie through not washing their hands, shit getting washed into rivers and then people drink the water, flies going from their shit to their food etc - all the basic ways that you get diarrhoea). GROSS but effective!

Once they see this they are all shocked, disgusted and angry, and agree that something should be done - and ask us to come and build latrines. But we put it back on them, and ask them what they can do - it's their problem, and they should take the initiative if they want to stop getting sick from poor hygiene. So we basically convince them to build their own toilets by digging their own pits (they have tools for digging in their fields) and making the latrine structure from local materials (bamboo, wood, plastic sheet, whatever they have). We also show them that a latrine doesn't have to be a solid structure made of bricks and cement. The end aim of the exercise is that communities declare themselves "open defecation free" by a certain date, which means everyone has their own functional latrine without any material input from us. We keep monitoring until this is achieved and then we celebrate with the community about it. It could be in 6 months time or longer, maybe shorter, depending on the enthusiasm of the community.

We now have 5 villages that we are working in in Rumbek that we need to visit regularly, to make sure their latrine construction progress is going well. It will be interesting to see from here what happens. We will also be implementing it in Upper Nile, so one of my activities there will be to plan it out.

So that's been an interesting exercise over the last few days.

... and just to add to this, I got some feedback from staff coming back to Upper Nile (where I am now - this place is in the middle of nowhere!) that a large number of people had already started digging their latrines (20 in one village, which was the highest, then 16, then 11), three days after they had agreed to participate in CLTS - which is a great start.

But the hard work is ahead of us. Bring on the challenge!