In the Amhara Region of Ethiopia, the Learning by Doing Initiative (LBDI), a joint project between the Government of Ethiopia, the Amhara Regional Health Bureau, USAID’s Hygiene Improvement Project (HIP), and the Water and Sanitation Program, started at large scale and then expanded, growing from an initial 93,000 households in four districts to include 5.8 million people in 94 districts. LBDI resulted in 2.8 million more people stopping the practice of open defecation.
In Learning by Doing: Working at Scale in Ethiopia, Kebede Faris and Julia Rosenbaum summarize key strategies and lessons from LBDI.Working at the sub-district level, LBDI trained a cadre of outreach workers, focusing on both community mobilization and household-level behavior change tools. Strategies including building capacity at the community level and developing and testing tools and training manuals. LBDI also emphasized “small doable actions,” whereby health extension workers negotiated directly with household members to determine the sanitation and hygiene options best suited to their household’s needs.
For more information on LBDI please contact Kebede Faris at wspaf@worldbank.org or Julia Rosenbaum at jrosenba@fhi360.org.
See Related Content:
- Results from Working at Scale for Better Sanitation and Hygiene in Amhara, Ethiopia: Baseline and Endline Comparisons of Institutional, Household, and School Surveys (full report)
- Success Story: Promoting Hygiene Improvement in Amhara, Ethiopia
- Stepping Onto the Sanitation Ladder: Stopping Open Defecation in Rural Ethiopia (video)
- WSP Approaches to Scaling Up Rural Sanitation in Ethiopia and Tanzania (slide presentation)
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