South Africa will host the 12th annual World Toilet Summit in Durban from 3-6 December 2012. The South African Toilet Organization (SATO) is co-organsing this annual World Toilet Organization (WTO) event.
The main theme of the Summit is African Sanitation: Scaling Up – Dignity for All.
IDS Bulletin, Feb 21, 2012
Why not Basics for All? Scopes and Challenges of Community-led Total Sanitation
Kamal Kar
The ‘Some for All’ dictum may work well for the water sector but is not appropriate and workable for the sanitation sector. We live in a paradox of concern for water quality for drinking, while displaying less concern about the haphazard and uncontrolled contamination of the sources of natural water. By contrast, the principle of ‘at least something for all/why not basics for all?’ on which Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is based, leads to collective behaviour change on a grand scale and empowers communities to completely eliminate open defecation and thus protect water bodies as well as improve health and livelihoods outcomes.
This is achieved through a process of collective local action with no upfront individual hardware subsidy and no prescribed models. With some 50 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America now adopting the approach, future challenges include sustainability, scaling-up with quality, gaining political buy in and addressing issues concerning environmental health and waste disposal.
Wasting Away: Can a Gates Foundation-Funded Toilet-Design Initiative End a Foul Practice in the Developing World?
A low-tech plumbing challenge searches for the “iPad of commodes”
By Jim Nash | Scientific American, Feb 21, 2012
ACCEPTING THE CHALLENGE: According to UNICEF, 2.6 billion people, almost entirely in the developing world, use bucket, public or open (uncovered) latrines, if they use latrines at all. Image: Courtesy of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Chances are that if you are reading this, you have a private flush toilet a few steps from your bed. Your commode is more reliable than your mobile connection, and likely will outlast all of your home appliances. Yet huge tracts of the developing world have yet to see so much as a latrine, a situation that facilitates the spread of debilitating or even deadly diarrheal diseases.
Advocates for universal access to and use of basic personal sanitation hope their efforts will get a big boost in August, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation present several hygienic innovations developed through its Reinventing the Toilet Challenge. Technology alone might help with failing sewers in industrialized countries, but for poor nations, where changing social norms is more important, the Gates Foundation is a powerful ally. The foundation’s involvement could do for sanitation what it has accomplished in the battle to eradicate malaria—raise the visibility of a fundamental health care crisis and encourage new efforts to end it.
Year in Review – 10 Key Studies on Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) from 2011
This issue of the WASHplus Weekly highlights 10 CLTS reports or studies published in 2011. The reports are reviews or evaluations of CLTS projects or programs in India, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Nigeria. One report (Kar) gives insights about features that have facilitated the rapid spread of CLTS in Africa and also discusses issues that limit its impact and dissemination. Please let WASHplus know if you have other recent resources on CLTS or if you have suggestions for future issues of the Weekly.
Content:
November 22, 2011 – UNITED Nations Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF) chief, water, sanitation, and hygiene section, Mr Vinod Alkari, has revealed that, Nigeria loses N455 billion annually or 1.3 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) due to poor sanitation.
Similarly, he added that, 33 million people defecate in the open while only a third of the country’s population have access to improved sanitation, with high morbidity and mortality as direct consequences.
UNICEF chief, Alkari, stated this on Monday at the opening ceremony of the third national roundtable conference on Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in Nigeria, held in Katsina State.
Alkari, represented by Mr Bisi Agberemi, explained that, due to sanitation related diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery and typhoid, 728 deaths were recorded from January to November, this year in 197 local government areas in 25 states in the country.
According to him, improving the disposal of human excreta and stopping open defecation can drastically reduce the disease burden caused by sanitation related diseases and contribute to economic transformation of the country.
The UNICEF chief, who expressed his organisation’s commitment to sanitation development, said “UNICEF will continue to partner with relevant stakeholders to implement other high impact and cost effective interventions to reduce sanitation related diseases.”
He, however, commended the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, Katsina State government and the National Task Group on Sanitation for organising the conference and hoped that, participants would make positive contributions to achieve the set targets for sanitation in the country.
Posted in Africa, Economic Benefits, Sanitation and Health
Plan International USA Receives $7 Million Grant for Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) Research Project in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana
Plan’s Testing Modified CLTS for Scalability project aims to improve rural sanitation by researching and testing the cost-effectiveness, sustainability, and scalability of the CLTS approach
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Every year, more than 2.4 million people die from diarrheal and sanitation-related diseases – the most vulnerable and disproportionately affected are children under the age of five. In 2008, there were nearly one million deaths from diarrheal disease in Africa alone, according to the World Health Organization.
In September, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Plan International USA a four-year $7 million dollar learning and implementation grant to determine how to best introduce Community-Led Total Sanitation solutions in developing countries. Research and testing will be conducted on new and specifically designed projects in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana and will examine the CLTS approach, ultimately aiming to uncover ways to make it more scalable and cost-effective.
Participatory research conducted in 80 communities in East Java shows that communities achieving ODF status within two months of CLTS triggering are more likely to achieve higher access gains and remain ODF longer than communities that take many months to achieve ODF status. Continue reading
In a blog post in Impatient Optimists, Deputy Director of WASH Louis Boorstin explains how the Gates Foundation is supporting efforts to help communities end the practice of open defecation.
The Foundation believes that community engagement is essential to ensure sustainable access to improved sanitation and that community led total sanitation, or CLTS is the most effective approach to realise this (Boorstin refers to a 2011 WSP report supporting this).
Digging in, Spreading Out and Growing Up: Introducing CLTS in Africa
It also discusses challenges, however, noting several issues which may limit its impact and hinder its dissemination. In particular, the paper discusses some of the many adaptations made to CLTS in response to a wide range of pressures, varying country circumstances and strategy choices. These adaptations, it is claimed, should be made with a clear picture of what may be lost and gained by adopting them. As CLTS progresses further, it will be important to continue to grapple with these issues, to acknowledge the lessons from adaptations that have had little success, and to retain a vision of the potential of CLTS to bring fundamental transformations in sanitation, health and rural lives.
Kamal Kar and Kirsty Milward (July 2011)
Link to full-text: IDS Practice Paper Number 8.
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