Resources: About approach, scaling up

The Lukenya Notes are a collection of experiences and key recommendations from the IDS meeting of CLTS practitioners held in Lukenya, Nairobi in July 2011, immediately after the AfricaSan3 meeting. The aim of the workshop was to focus on the key challenges we all face in taking CLTS to scale. Insights, case studies and options are clustered by themes which emerged from workshop brainstorming.

Using snapshot case studies of CLTS in Africa, Kamal Kar makes the case for CLTS in Africa and shares his thoughts on ways forward in this new publication from the CLTS Foundation.

This paper draws on the extensive involvement of Kamal Kar with the spread of CLTS in Africa to describe the early stages of the process, to elaborate on its developments and to outline insights into the circumstances and features which have facilitated its rapid spread. Taking a broadly comparative approach which draws on the somewhat earlier experience of the spread of CLTS in Asia, it identifies aspects of the institutionalisation process and circumstances, including key individuals, that have contributed to the success of the approach in Africa.

Kamal Kar’s Trainers’ Training Guide on Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), published by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC).

Robert Chambers and Kamal Kar

by Frank Marita and Samuel Musyoki, Plan Kenya (November 2008).

From one Open Defecation Free (ODF) village (Jaribuni in Kilifi District) in November 2007 to four as of 19th November 2008, with close to 40 villages awaiting verification to be declared ODF, it is now clear that CLTS is steadily becoming a sanitation success story in Kenya.

When a practice becomes widespread enough, then it has ‘gone to scale’. But
increasing the intensity and spread of a particular practice is not a linear or obvious
endeavour.

The paper proposes that going to scale is multi-dimensional and complex. It focuses
on Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS): an innovation in participatory methodology, as well as a unique approach to sanitation. The paper describes how CLTS offers important lessons to understand spread which is critical for scaling up in an effective way. The main argument is that spread and adaptation are important aspects of scaling up, which is often neglected in the literature.