The Urban Sanitation Research Initiative is a research programme designed to drive pro-poor sector change in urban sanitation in Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya and globally. It is led by World Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) in collaboration with key in-country partners, and core-funded by UK aid from the UK government to run from 2017–2020.
This BBC news article tells the tragic story of a five-year-old boy, Michael Komape, drowning in a poorly maintained school pit latrine in northern South Africa in 2014. It highlights a serious national problem: less than a fifth of schools have access to a latrine and where they do many have been found to be unsafe, which has resulted in another similar tragic death of a young girl this year.
During the East and Southern Africa Regional Rural Sanitation Workshop organised by the CLTS Knowledge Hub in Arusha (hosted by SNV Tanzania) we heard how successful achievement of SDG 6.2 requires efforts to reach the ‘last mile’ with adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene.
Following our recent East and Southern Africa regional rural sanitation workshop in Tanzania in April 2018, we are delighted to share with you the first official output from the event, a learning brief which presents the common challenges and barriers to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 that the workshop participants identified across the region.
Amongst other things, four key issues emerged:
We have brought together a mix of useful resources produced in connection with the two essential Africa focused CLTS Knowledge Hub workshops we ran this year. Both workshops aimed to highlight common sanitation challenges and share innovations across the region. The first workshop based in Tanzania brought sanitation experts from across East and Southern Africa, the second based in Senegal brought together those from across West and Central Africa.
We are currently in the process of constructing this page - all resources will be avaialble shortly.
A wealth of knowledge emerged from our recent East and Southern Africa Regional Sharing and Learning Workshop on CLTS and Rural Sanitation in Arusha, Tanzania in April.
We have so much we want to share with you – the workshop report, hunter gatherer reports, blogs, articles, photos and videos – that we are setting up a dedicated webpage in the next month. We will keep you posted on this. But in the meantime here are three short video interviews captured at the event with experts across the region talking on a diversity of key issues.
Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is a widely used, community-based approach to tackle open defecation and its health-related problems. Although CLTS has been shown to be successful in previous studies, little is known about how CLTS works.
The seventh South Asian Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN), a government led biennial convention, was held in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 10-14, 2018.
Since being established in 2003 its objectives are:
This blog post is on reaching the 'last mile' and moving up the sanitation ladder - learnings that emerged from the East and Southern Africa Sharing and Learning Workshop. At the recent CLTS Knowledge Hub regional sharing and learning workshop held in Arusha 16-20 April, it was encouraging to see that the discourse and programming in the region has matured since the early days of CLTS (and early days of these sharing and learning workshops!).
In this short video interview Dean Spears (Executive Director, RICE/Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Texas at Austin) talks about the key motivations behind the award-winning book he co-authored with Diane Coffey, 'Where India Goes: Abandoned toilets, stunted development, and the cost of caste.'
