Safely Managed Sanitation Services in the Global Sanitation Fund (GSF)

Sustainable Development Goal 6 for water and sanitation calls for the realization of safely managed services (SMSS) for everyone by 2030. While there has been significant research and implementation to improve the sanitation service chain in urban settings, little guidance is available on how to achieve and sustain SMSS in rural contexts.

In 2019, WSSCC commissioned this study conducted by Andy Robinson and Andy Peal to examine to what extent Global Sanitation Fund (GSF)-supported programmes enabled SMSS in rural areas with collective behaviour change approaches like CLTS.

This study includes:
– A summary of SMSS concepts and issues in rural areas
– SMSS findings from GSF-supported programmes in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia
– Good practices for monitoring SMSS in rural areas
– Recommendations for rural programming

Authors: WSSCC; Publication date: October 2020; Publisher: WSSCC; No. of pages: 155

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Sanitation Learning Hub launched

Following the start of a new four-year programme funded by Sida, the Institute of  Development Studies (IDS) launched the Sanitation Learning Hub website on 22 June 2020.

The website is divided into into three main sections:

Practical Support 

This section presents recommended approaches and practical tools to help sanitation and hygiene practitioners do their job well. It reflects our commitment to adaptable, ‘combinable’ and context-specific learning and sanitation approaches. Each approach page has an introduction recommended resources.

Current Thinking

Resources are divided by nine essential themes in this section. Each theme has an introduction, recommended resources, and sub-themes that get into more detail.

• Behaviour change
• Climate change
• Challenging contexts
• Gender
• Health
• Hygiene
• Leave No One Behind
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning
• Sustainability and safely-managed sanitation

Connect, Share, Learn

The desire to bring together sanitation and hygiene professionals is reflected here. You can find blogs, news, events in the sector and more information about workshops, including stories from participants of past workshops. You can also submit a blog in this section.

Watch this video introduction to the new website.

IRC WASH Symposium 2019: “All Systems Go!”

From 12 – 14 March 2019 IRC and partners will be hosting a symposium on building and strengthening strong systems to deliver safe and sustainable WASH services for everyone.

Location: The Hague, The Netherlands

Registration: early bird registration extended till 21 November 2018 – online registration

Call for Abstracts: deadline extended to 8 October 2018 – full call for abstracts

All information on the symposium web page

Keeping Track: CLTS Monitoring, Certification and Verification

Keeping Track: CLTS Monitoring, Certification and Verification: CLTS Knowledge Hub Learning Paper, January 2017. 

• Full text, pdf

Author: Katherine Pasteur

Monitoring, verification and certification are critical elements of the CLTS process and contribute to ensuring sustainability of ODF as well as learning about changes that are needed to improve implementation. Monitoring includes both process and progress monitoring.

Verification tends to be led by NGOs or government with clear criteria and methodologies being developed, often incorporating multiple assessment visits over an extended period of time. Certification and celebration of ODF communities acknowledge their achievement and helps to raise awareness in the surrounding areas.

The adoption of CLTS as a national approach in many countries has resulted in national protocols and guidance documents as well as various methodologies for community engagement and data collection to aid the processes of monitoring, verification and certification. Increasingly, the importance of post ODF monitoring is being recognised. We need to know more about how to incorporate this into implementation to ensure longer term sustainability of behaviour change and of toilets.

Similarly, effective collection, management and utilisation of data are a challenge. Other emerging issues relate to reliability and accuracy of monitoring and verification; encouraging appropriate attitudes to encourage learning rather than fault finding; and how to incentivise staff involved in monitoring and verification. We also need to know more about monitoring for long term sustainability of behaviour change and inclusion. Many of these issues are being investigated through local, national and international learning processes.

This Learning Paper summarises challenges, innovations and gaps in knowledge in the area of monitoring, verification and certification.

Understanding ‘slippage’

As sanitation and hygiene programmes mature, the challenge shifts from helping communities achieve open defecation free (ODF) status to sustaining this status. In this context, many programmes are confronted with ‘slippage’ – the return to previous unhygienic behaviours, or the inability of some or all community members to continue to meet all ODF criteria. How should slippage be understood and addressed? A new report – primarily based on experiences from the Global Sanitation Fund (GSF)-supported programme in Madagascar, provides comprehensive insights.

Download the complete paper or read the feature article below.

Eugène de Ligori Rasamoelina, Executive Director of the Malagasy NGO Miarantsoa, triggers commune leaders. Miarantsoa pioneered Follow-up MANDONA, a proven approach for mitigating slippage. Photo: WSSCC/Carolien van der Voorden

Slippage is intricate because it is hinged on the philosophy and complexity of behaviour change. Moreover, the definition of slippage is linked to the definition of ODF in a given country. The more demanding the ODF criteria are, the more slippage one can potentially experience.

DFID should ensure sustainability of its WASH programmes – independent review

Richard Gledhill

By Richard Gledhill, ICAI lead commissioner for WASH review

62.9 million people – almost the population of the UK – that’s how many people in developing countries DFID claimed to have reached with WASH interventions between 2011 and 2015.

It’s an impressive figure. And – in our first ever ‘impact review’ – it’s a figure the Independent Commission for Aid Impact found to be based on credible evidence.

We assessed the results claim made by DFID about WASH, testing the evidence and visiting projects to see the results for ourselves. We  concluded that the claim was credible – calculated using appropriate methods and conservative assumptions.

But what does reaching 62.9 million people really mean? Have lives been transformed? And have the results been sustainable?

SuSanA monthly webinar 2: “Collaborative monitoring, a prerequisite to achieve universal access to WASH,” May 26th 2016 at 9:00 EDT

Please join us for a webinar on ‘Collaborative monitoring, a prerequisite to achieve universal access to WASH’ scheduled for May 26th 2016 at 9:00 EDT (New York time). This is the second webinar in a monthly recurring series on SuSanA.

Overview: Through the UN Sustainable Development Goals, countries have committed to achieve universal access to water and sanitation by 2030. To realise this ambitious goal, they must pull together and regularly review progress in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) access. This webinar is an opportunity to look into some of the main obstacles to effective monitoring (lack of transparency, inclusion and accountability) and how collaborative monitoring can bring a partial response. The WASHwatch platform will also be presented as a tool to achieve collaborative monitoring with concrete examples of the different platform’s uses by partners.

Presenter: Elisa Dehove – Policy Officer – Monitoring and Accountability, WaterAid

The webinar will last approximately 45 minutes. Elisa’s presentation will be followed by perspectives from other WaterAid offices, followed by an open discussion with webinar participants. We will also open the session 30 minutes beforehand for a low-key ‘mingle’ among participants, where you can use your computer video or microphone to chat with others.

The webinar is being hosted by Stockholm Environment Institute and the SuSanA secretariat as part of a grant to SEI funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

SuSanA forum link: http://forum.susana.org/forum/categories/146-webinars-and-online-meetings/18029-susana-monthly-webinar-2-collaborative-monitoring-a-prerequisite-to-achieve-universal-access-to-wash-may-26th-900-edt-new-york-time

Time:
9:00 New York/Washington DC
14:00 London, 15:00 Stockholm, 16:00 Nairobi ,20:00 Hanoi, 23:00 Sydney

To register please follow this link: www.susana.org/en/webinar-registration

If you would like to present your work, please contact sarah.dickin@sei-international.org to sign-up for future dates.

IRC – Lessons learnt from WASH action research with practitioners in four countries

Lessons learnt from WASH action research with practitioners in four countries, 2016. IRC. Authors: Snel, M., Verhoeven, J.

Having local researchers work with local stakeholders on the development of monitoring tools has been an important success of the Action Research for Learning programme.

This three-year initiative (2013–2015) was set up to improve the effectiveness of existing hygiene promotion and community empowerment programmes of selected local Dutch WASH Alliance partners in four countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda.

Local NGOs in the four countries have been supported to develop a monitoring framework with indicators for their specific activity. Tools such as household questionnaires and key informant interview guides have been jointly developed to do data collection on the indicators. After the actual data collection, analyses have been done, sense has been made of the data and lessons have been drawn up out of the outcomes.

The monitoring activities have helped local NGOs to improve the programmes they are working in:

Building a monitoring framework

In Ethiopia Amref Health Africa constructs public toilets and showers in places where many people gather as one way to increase access to sanitation, water and hygiene. It trained local youth to manage and operate the showers and toilets.

Because of Action Research for Learning, local partners started to meet with the washhouse youth management committee and health extension workers to reflect on progress and consider questions: ‘Is monthly revenue sufficient to cover the monthly operation costs? Are the showers being kept clean?

Are people in rural areas washing their hands after defecation and before handling food?’ It became clear in this process that extra training in managing the toilet and shower blocks was needed.

Read the complete article.

A toilet for 66 million people in rural Bangladesh

BRAC staff member on a household visit

In Bangladesh, the largest NGO in the world BRAC is working its way up to help the country to get proper sanitation. It has reached more than half of the population since the start 9 years ago. It is one of the world’s largest sanitation implementation programmes. IRC works with BRAC to make it happen. In this interview, IRC sanitation expert Ingeborg Krukkert tells her story about her work in Bangladesh. ”

Bangladesh is well on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030,” says Ingeborg Krukkert in IRC’s headquarters in The Hague. “This is undeniably due to BRAC because it’s serving half of the country. Bangladesh is a good example for others on how to achieve so much in such a short time. It is proof that change is possible.”

IRC’s Sanitation and hygiene specialist for Asia, Ingeborg Krukkert, travels to Bangladesh every two months to work with BRAC. Working on hygiene promotion and behavior change, she complements BRAC’s groundbreaking programme with IRC’s monitoring system to measure and enhance the true impact in sanitation and hygiene.

Sanitation monitoring – what role for the sanitation ladder? Join the discussion!

Sustainable Sanitation Alliance is holding a 3-week thematic discussion on the topic: the sanitation ladder

“The Sanitation Ladder: Next Steps” thematic discussion is the first discussion in the newly launched Thematic Discussion Series from the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA)!

This first thematic discussion is taking place from February 9-27 2015 on the SuSanA Discussion Forum. Up-to-date bi-weekly summaries of the discussions will be posted.  On Thursday, February 20th, a webinar will be led by the thematic leads to discuss the key issues from the discussion. The exact time of the webinar will be posted next week.

The discussion focuses on the development of the sanitation ladder, the post-2015 agenda and monitoring challenges, and the way forward. Three thematic experts are providing leadership throughout the discussions: Patrick Bracken, a Water and Sanitation Specialist from AHT Group AG, Elisabeth Kvarnström, a senior consultant with Urban Water Management, Inc., and Ricard Gine, WASH researcher from the Universitat Polècnica de Catalunya.

To participate in the discussion and for more information, please see: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/185-th…on-ladder-next-steps.