Participatory Learning and Action 61: Community-led total sanitation in Africa

Forthcoming June 2010

PLA 61 will be a special edition on community-led total sanitation, guest edited by Sammy Musyoki from Plan International and Petra Bongartz from the Insitute of Development Studies, UK.

In recent years, sanitation has received renewed attention internationally and has
been acknowledged as one of the central components of development because of its
interconnections with health, livelihoods, education, the environment, and other
sectors. Its close ties with poverty reduction are being increasingly recognised.
The WHO and UNICEF reports suggest that as many as one in three people
worldwide lack sanitation facilities. Most of those affected live in low-income countries
in Asia and Africa. Poor sanitation, lack of access to clean water, and inadequate
personal hygiene are responsible for an estimated 90% of incidences of childhood
diarrhoea (WHO). It is estimated that diarrhoeal diseases kill at least two million children in poor countries each year, and diarrhoea is the second highest single cause of child mortality (WHO).

Despite the efforts and resources that have been poured into sanitation in the last decade, the millennium development goal (MDG) for sanitation (‘halving by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic
sanitation’) is a distant dream for many developing countries. Providing subsidies
to build toilets has not been enough and creates a culture of dependency on external
help.

In contrast, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) focuses on mobilisation of collective action and behaviour change to ensure real and sustainable improvements in sanitation and hygiene. CLTS has its origins in Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), drawing on simple PRA visual tools such as mapping, transect walks, and flow
diagrams to enable communities to analyse and learn from their hygiene habits and
practices, and come up with collective action plans for sanitising their habitat without depending on external subsidies.

This issue will focus on recent CLTS experiences in Africa, enabling sharing of experience and lessons, and improving practice and policy around CLTS. Practitioners
will come together to share and reflect critically on the questions, issues, and challenges that CLTS practice throws up, and develop articles for the issue. This
will be of interest to practitioners in Africa as well as other regions.

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