Community Led Total Sanitation Potentials and Challenges for application in Urban areas

1. Community Led Total Sanitation Potentials and Challenges for application in Urban areas What have we learnt about local empowerment and collective behaviour change at the urban community level? Dr. Kamal Kar “Planning and Implementation of Sustainable Sanitation in Urban /Semi-Urban settings -need for development of existing tools” Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm 25th-26th August 2008

2. Traditional - professional ‘mind-set’ in tackling the problems • Subsidize * Standardize *Prescribe * Top-down hygiene behaviour teaching* Health as key motivator for hygiene behaviour change • People don’t have latrines, so give them latrines • People are poor & can’t afford toilets; so give them free or subsidized latrines, prescribe latrine models that last long • Rural/urban poor communities don’t know the implications of fecal-oral contaminations; so teach them hygiene behaviour practices • They are not interested to live clean life, so attract them in may ways so that they use toilets and reward those who does that

3. Fate of free toilets in a slum of a Municipality town near Calcutta, India

4. Fate of subsidized sanitation hardware- Portloko, Sierra Leone, Ibb, Yemen Who’s design for whom?

5. Fate of sanitation subsidy in Yemen

6. Millions Countries without basic toilets or with open defecation practice

7. What is Community – Led Total Sanitation ? • They are total & involve/affect everyone in communities e.g. total elimination of open defecation, total freedom from hunger) • Collective Community decision & collective local action are the keys • Social Solidarity and cooperation are in abundance • They are locally decided and don't dependent on external subsidies and prescriptions or pressures • Natural Leaders emerge from collective local actions who lead future collective initiatives • They often don’t follow externally determined mode of development and blue print • Local diversity and innovations are main elements

8. Identification of right person in the community Self Empowered Committee formed • Defecation area transect • Defecation Mapping • Flow diagram • Calculation of faeces etc. Entry/ Ignition PRA How to get a latrine slab Registration daily monitoring on map Start pit latrine from tomorrow Community realization of terrible impact of faecal-oral contamination Spreading messages from the mosque We do it first and stop open defecation Each of us cover 10 families 10 H/H 10 H/H Diagrammatic presentation of the process of igniting Community- Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)

9. Land less don’t have place for defecation. Land owners often blame them for defecating in open. Landless poor (women specially) are the worst victims who want to come out of that humiliation. Will form positive pressure groups from within to convince others for having latrine X Better off L X X X X L X L X L L Medium X Spoiling environment by open defecation X X X X X Poor X X Very poor X X L L X X X X Latrine owners can’t get rid of negative impacts as many others adding faces everywhere. X L X X X X X X X Participatory Planning P. R. A. X X X Moving towards 100% sanitised village

10. More yellow powder in places where there is more shit- Sierra Leone

12. CLTS involves the entire community in collective action to end open defecation-Kudappa district in AP, India

13. Rural community in Mardan, NWFP, in Pakistan mapping defecation areas of village

14. Worried faces after realising the sanitation situation

15. Communities on the Andes mountains of Bolivia in action to clean up their villages

17. Food and shit demonstration

18. Who is teaching and who is learning?

19. Open Defecation areas and household calculation of shit shown on a social map

20. Community of Sar Safar village in Arba Minch town setting new example of CLTS in Ethiopia

21. Natural Leaders construct their toilets first

22. Collective local action began in all households immediately after triggering of CLTS

23. We all want to stop defecating in the open and we will accomplish it in one month

24. Women sharing plans of ending defecation in buckets at home & emptying them in the open at night- NWFP, Pakistan

25. Distinct example of social solidarity- rich of village declaring help for all to achieve ODF status

26. Community latrine constructed over a defunct ring well –no subsidy- all local innovation. Whose idea?

27. We have constructed this and we all use it. Whose ideas are appropriate? Who can scale-up faster?

28. Plastic pans are available in the shops of remote villages in Bangladesh wherever CLTS is in progress. Private sector participation has boosted up 100% total sanitation remarkably.

29. From rain water harvesting jars to making san-plates in Kampung Spu, Cambodia. Who is responding to who’s demand? Could they be equal partners of developing strategies of sanitation marketing?

30. Local dealer of sanitary hard ware displaying different models of sanitary toilets that suits different pockets, PLAN Bangladesh promotes CLTS without subsidy.

31. Mr. Sinoeun, Deputy Chief of Commune Council takes the pride of showing locally innovated toilets to outsiders- Kampong Chhnang

32. Local Community Innovation in Kalyani

33. Local Community Innovation in Kalyani

34. Local Community Innovation in Kalyani

35. Signboard declaring Open Defecation-Free, Para Vidyasagar Colony, Kalyani Municipality, West Bengal

36. Repair platform of all 69 hand tube wells Stop Open Defecation All 213 H/H Clean up drain In 5 months ten slums covering more than 800 H/Hs have stopped OD by constructing toilets mobilizing more money than what KUSP could offer as subsidy Clean up garbage and Repair Road

37. Beyond ODF! Neat and clean roads maintained by ODF communities (Lumajang, East Java and Kampung Spu in Cambodia)

38. Do we have patience to allow communities to gradually move up the Sanitation Ladder? Sanitation behaviors changes as community moves up the ladder Pour flush latrine Latrines with plastic pan and water seal Offset Pit latrines Simple Pit Latrines 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Open defecation O

39. What have we learnt? • CLTS in urban slums is possible only when there is political will • Urban poor live in far more deplorable condition of sanitation and hygiene than rural poor • Pace of ‘Rural-Urban’ migration is alarming. It increases as livelihoods in rural areas get more and more unsecured • Most governments don’t want to invest or extend services to unauthorized slums • Millions of urban poor live in illegal or unauthorized slums & shanties with constant threat of eviction

40. What have we learnt? • Politicians use urban poor slum dwellers as puns & vote bank for their vested political interest • Urban poor in some city slums don’t have voting rights, hence councilors have no interest for such poor communities (Mymensing, Bangladesh) • Settlement rights is the priority of urban poor • Urban poor are interested to live clean life who hesitate to invest on sanitation for fear of eviction • Urban poor living along railway tracks, waste land, garbage dumping areas have no access to water, electricity and sanitation facilities

41. What have we learnt? • Urban poor in big city slums live in very small cubicles as tenants where house owners have no interest to create sanitation facilities • When water, sanitation, lanes and infrastructure improves, the poor are pushed out as the price of the land shoots up • Allurement of a few free toilets disempowers the entire community who continue to live in filth and pay constant price on health • Loss of livelihoods of urban poor due to diarrhea and other enteric diseases is very common

42. What had been our learning from rural CLTS so far? • Spontaneous initiation of collective local action towards achieving ODF is possible by the urban poor • Ignited communities put their acts together to stop OD without waiting for external help and support • Households irrespective of well being categories go all out in adopting latrines of their own choices using all available resources and markets • Rich and poor unites together to collectively achieve the ‘public-good’-ODF. Social solidarity is always in abundance in CLTS triggered communities

43. What motivated communities to plan and act collectively towards OD? • Disgust, shame, fear and self-respect shakes communities and push them towards achieving ODF status as soon as possible. • The basic assumption on which CLTS stands is that ‘every human being has self- respect, dignity and wouldn’t agree to ingest each other’s shit’ after knowing it. • Toilets could be built at such low cost using locally available materials as a starting point to hygiene behaviour change • Slight encouragement from the elected people’s representatives can make a big difference in uniting urban communities

44. What are the special learning from urban CLTS? • Pro-poor strategies for urban slums must be developed if access to sanitation by the urban poor has to improve • Politicians and government must work together to resolve the issues of urban poor • Institutionalized corruption poses serious bottleneck in spread and scaling up of urban CLTS

45. Overall Lessons Learned CLTS entails a shift of paradigm and change of power relations • From teaching to facilitating • From engineering designs to local designs • From targets and counting latrines to counting communities ODF • From big budgets and pressures to disburse to adequate budgets • From us helping the poor to communities taking responsibility • From us being sensitive to taboos to communities handling them • From sanitised words to the crude ones – faeces are SHIT!

46. Overall Lessons Learned • Post-triggering follow-up with support and encouragement is vital • If no ODF villages emerge quickly after triggering, it is not good CLTS • Verification of ODF status must be honest and done well • Rewards for achieving ODF status lead to false declarations • Beware misuse of the CLTS label, and confusion with total sanitation campaigns

47. What have we learnt? • We need to change – personally, professionally, institutionally • No individual household hardware subsidy in rural areas (markets, schools, urban can be different) • Enough money but not too much • Natural Leaders are a wonderful resource for spreading CLTS • Train facilitators and trainers hands-on with communities. Mentor and support them. Beware of consultants who screw things up! • Good trainers and facilitators are special people. Not all can do it

48. What do we need to do? • Help sceptics to experience CLTS, seeing it in action • Don’t rush to scale. The number of good facilitators and capacity for follow-up must determine speed. Go to scale steadily with quality • Seek critical and honest feedback e.g. learning workshops (Ethiopia) • Network, share experience (Regional Learning Centres proposed in Ethiopia and Nigeria). IDS website…..let’s have more • Keep the core elements of CLTS and innovate and adapt CLTS is challenging, fulfilling and fun

49. Global Spread of CLTS Afghanistan NEPAL EGYPT PAKISTAN BANGLADESH INDIA YEMEN CAMBODIA ETHIOPIA SIERRA LEONE NIGERIA UGANDA KENYA INDONESIA TANZANIA EAST TIMOR MALAWI ZAMBIA BOLIVIA

50. To find out more about CLTS, • visit • http://www.livelihoods.org/hot_topics/CLTS.html • where you can • Read about the CLTS in practise • See lessons from around the world • Download key background documents; ‘Subsidy or Self Respect?’ and “how to” guides, including the Handbook on CLTS • Contribute your own lessons, experiences and materials on CLTS • For more information and to join the CLTS mailing list, email P.Bongartz@ids.ac.uk