Resources: Case studies, Asia

In 2007 Plan International Indonesia (Plan Indonesia) adopted Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) as its only approach for implementing sanitation projects in its 9 Program Unit sites. This paper outlines the process being undertaken to take CLTS to scale, the key factors that have enabled it and the lessons learned so far.

Research conducted in rural Bangladesh in Union Parishads that were declared 100% open defecation free almost five years ago shows that 90% of households in the areas studied have sustained use of a latrine that adequately confines feces.

Extract from the BBC/TVE Earth Report on CLTS in Bangladesh which focuses in particular how CLTS has led to collective community activities beyond sanitation, eg solving the problem of monga (seasonal hunger) by returning to the old practice of cultivating vine potatoes.

Watch the video (6 mins)

Short write up of Plan’s CLTS activities, experiences, results and lessons learned in Dompu district, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia.

SNV carried out a participatory review of their Sanitation Demand and
Behaviour Change activities in North-West Vietnam in 2010. SNV has been piloting Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in Vietnam as part of the National Target Program for Rural Water Supply and Sanitation II since 2008 as a tool for sanitation demand creation. Ahead of the CLTS scale-up, SNV conducted this review of the pilot activities to understand factors that generated success within the pilot, so that these could be replicated in the expanded program, and also to build shared understanding and enthusiasm with partners for the scale-up activities.

Note by Amrit Mehta of Knowledge Links, India, on his experience of CLTS triggering with children in schools as well as in villages. It shows that children can act as a powerful agents of change within communities.

Good hygiene is part of total sanitation but deeply embedded cultural beliefs can make behaviour change difficult. Therefore, to plant the seeds of change early, Plan Bangladesh supports a programme of school sanitation and household hygiene education through a child-to-child approach in 83 schools of Sreepur upazila.

SLTS has been implemented in Nepal since 2005. The approach incorporates the basic elements of the School Sanitation and Hygiene Education (SSHE) programme, the reward and revolving fund aspects of the Basic Sanitation Package (BSP), and the participatory tools and techniques of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). In the 15 districts of Nepal where UNICEF is active, SLTS is reaching out to 60,000 households with 300,000 people, with leadership coming from 200 schools.

by Devi Setiawan, WSP Indonesia

One pager on monitoring community progress towards ODF via sms gateways.

Kalyani is a planned town near Kolkata with a population of 82,000. It is seen as a city ‘made for middle class people’. However, the 52 slums around the city house almost 50% of the city’s population. Many of the slums’ inhabitants are migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. Whilst some of the slums are more recent, some are as old as 50 or 60 years, and the majority have no toilet facilities.

In the past, health and development programmes always counted the number of toilets and households, and it was the role of the councillors to decide who would get a toilet.

by Anupma Verma, Knowledge Links, India

One pager on how Natural Leaders in Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Uttrakhand and Meghalaya in India are being used as community consultants to inspire other villages.