“I remember the time when I’d get up to the chirping of the birds, walk across to a nearby field, relieve myself in the fresh, open air -undisturbed – go to the nearby canal, take a bath and then come home to a hearty breakfast… before going off to work in the fields,” said an old farmer.
“This is the mind-set against which we are working,” said Wasim Aslam, an activist striving to make 564 villages in Pakistan open defecation free (ODF).
Aslam is from Lodhran, one of the implementers of the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) campaign initiated by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP), and one 1,500 activists who have been trained to get the CLTS movement off the ground.
[...] The 1,500 trained activists are mostly men, but their success is in large measure due to the women behind them. Irfanullah, a local counsellor in Peshawar, said that had it not been for his wife, he would not have made any headway.
[...] “We want people to need a toilet. We don’t just give it to them as they may not necessarily use it. We work on their psychology,” said Aslam, adding that CLTS was first introduced in Pakistan in 2004.
[...] According to Javed Ali Khan, director-general of the Ministry of Environment, ODF initiatives have benefited about 1.12 million people. The practice of open defecation in rural areas came down from about 74 percent of the rural population in 1990, to 45 percent by 2006.
According to the Ministry of Environment, 73 percent of the population now has access to a latrine – 96 percent in urban areas, and 62 percent in rural areas.
CLTS is now included in the national sanitation policy, said [World Bank sanitation specialist] Alrai.
Source: IRIN, 12 Dec 2008
