Mauritania

Mauritania designed its first CLTS road map at the November 2008 workshop in Mali when many African countries were first introduced to CLTS. The first set of three workshops was given by CREPA, a Regional West African Training Centre chosen to train the region on CLTS. This was late March 2009.

A 32,000 large town (Rosso) and one adjacent rural village were chosen as starting points. This was a mistake. Today, after one year of work, 8 of the town’s 11 neighborhoods, representing 60% of the population are ODF but not the whole town. It became clear that urban CLTS only works in neighborhoods that have social cohesion and are fairly free of other problems.

The three Satara neighborhoods who never became ODF were places where the population had fairly recently established itself escaping from droughts or floods, and came from different cultural backgrounds and geographic locations. They were very poor people and had no ownership of their land. Moreover, the water table in the place is at 40 cms and during the rainy season every year flood waters reach up to 80cm above the surface.

Other problems complicated urban CLTS: the amount of garbage dumped in the streets, the practice of emptying shallow pits into the streets, the amount of transient population (a port of entry from Senegal), street children, abandoned houses easily used for defecation, schools with filled latrine pits, and insufficient public toilets.

On the positive side, even though a small percentage of the population had attended the triggering sessions, fairly quickly all were informed through radio, mosque preaching and newspaper articles. Moreover, rural towns wanting to imitate their region’s capital more quickly bought into CLTS. The city’s mayor, has been a real CLTS champion and has helped move the cause forward.

To date (June 2010), Mauritania has 77 ODF localities, including 8 urban neighborhoods, and 67 more in the follow up phase. About 80% of household latrines now have soap and water inside or nearby, because this is one of the criteria before a village is declared ODF.

On the upstream side, the government is preparing its Sanitation Policy and CLTS is mentioned as an alternative method for rural sanitation. The Ministry of Water and Hydraulics, has finally accepted to take over the whole operation and eventually take it to scale. The Minister himself has promised to fund an initial CLTS pilot in 3 districts, in about 300 villages. UNICEF will be co-funding some of these initiatives.