Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)

I aim to use my blog to evaluate future options that the growing, informal urban areas of countries such as Nigeria can adopt to improve their sanitation facilities. Top-down approaches have often failed to deliver long-term solutions and I feel the age of more bottom-up, inclusive yet expansive programmes that can be sustained by the community are upon us, especially as Africa, the fastest-growing continent on Earth aims to step out the shadow of aid.

Community Led Total Sanitation is exactly such a scheme. CLTS is a growing phenomenon and has already been implemented in over 56, mainly developing countries (Galvin, 2004: 1)

"CLTS is an innovative approach for empowering communities to completely eliminate open defecation (OD). It focuses on igniting a change in collective sanitation behaviour, which is achieved through a process of collective local action stimulated by facilitators from within or outside the community" (Kar, 2012: 3)

The term 'Own-key' and 'Turn-key' were initiatives that I introduced in an earlier post of mine. CLTS would constitute an 'own-key' initiative "where activities and arrangements are controlled by local communities", and provides an alternative to the more turn-key and top-down approaches of which "the extraction of financial resources to the service provider either as fees or taxation", is its running economic model (Drangert et al., 2002: 354)

The CLTS programme in Nigeria has made huge strides in achieving its target of total elimination of open-defecation practices. From its origin in 2008, where only 15 communities were reported OD free, in March 2013, over 4690 communities were claiming to be OD free (UNICEF, 2011: 3).

However, while the CLTS has been a highlight for community led approaches, it is an approach that has been relatively focused on rural communities. CLTS activities flourished in small communities with "socially and culturally homogenous populations", with its guiding principle of empowerment encouraging communities to collaborate and plan behavioural change locally (Sigler et al., 2014: 2). Whereas, in  "Urban areas - with their more diverse and less cohesive communities, population density and land tenure issues - present several issues for the CLTS process" (UNICEF, 2011: 19).

Having introduced you to the concept of Community Led Total Sanitation, I will use my final posts to discuss the possibility of scaling up CLTS to operate in urban areas and also along the way develop my own viewpoint as to whether I feel this is an adequate solution for growing urban areas.

Reference List:

Drangert J., J. Okotto-Okotto, L.G.O. Okotto and O. Auko (2002) 'Going Small When the City Grows Big New Options for Water Supply and Sanitation in Rapidly Expanding Urban Areas', International Water Resources Association, Water International, 27, 3, 354-363

Galvin, M. (2004) 'Talking Shit: Is Community-Led Total Sanitation a radical and revolutionary approach to sanitation?’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Review: Water, 2, 1, 9-20

Kar, K. (2012) 'Why not Basics for All? Scopes and Challenges of Community‐led Total Sanitation', Institute of Development (IDS) Buletin, 43, 2, 93-96

Sigler, R., L. Mahmoudii and J. Grahami (2014) 'Analysis of behavioral change techniques in community-led total sanitation programs', Health Promotion International, 1-13

UNICEF (2011) 'Community Led Total Sanitation in Nigeria', 1-69, Prepared for UNICEF and UK Aid