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On the 20th October 2013, a one-day CLTS Sharing and Learning workshop was held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in the run-up to the 5th South Asian Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN V). We were 45 participants, coming from different countries –with Nepal leading in terms of numbers of participants and India second– and with various degrees and kinds of experience in CLTS.
India is the country with the biggest open defecation problem in the world. In India, open defecation is practiced by more than half of households and by about 67% percent of rural households. In fact, 60 percent of people anywhere who defecate in the open live in India. This widespread lack of sanitation, combined with India’s high population density, poses important health threats for children.
Continued management of sanitation and hygiene services, post-intervention, is a global challenge, particularly in the school-setting. This situation threatens anticipated impacts of school sanitation and hygiene investments. To improve programming and policies, and increase the effectiveness of limited development
resources, this study seeks to understand how and why some schools have well-managed sanitation post-intervention,
while others do not.
This research study aimed to evaluate how an intervention, which combined hand washing promotion aimed at 5-year-olds with provision of free soap, affected illnesses among the children and their families and children’s school absenteeism. The study monitored illnesses, including diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections (ARIs), school absences and soap consumption for 41 weeks in 70 low-income communities in Mumbai, India. It showed that direct-contact hand washing interventions aimed at younger school-aged children can affect the health of the whole family.
Sanitation is probably one of the sectors with the highest levels of overreporting. It is clearly the case of India, where 4/5 of the toilets reported during the Total Sanitation Campaign were found ‘missing’ in the 2011 Census. The monitoring system, intended to measure the sanitation coverage increase, was found to actually reflect funds disbursement.
Children in West Bengal and Bangladesh are presumed to share the same distribution of genetic height potential. In West Bengal they are richer, on average, and are therefore slightly taller. However, when wealth is held constant, children in Bangladesh are taller. This gap can be fully accounted for by differences in open defecation, and especially by open defecation in combination with differences in women’s status and maternal nutrition.
