Community Let Sanitation

Programme (CLTS)
 What is CLTS?
• Process to inspire and empower rural
communities to stop open defecation
– Build and use latrine
• No subsidy to purchase hardware
• Ignite a collective sense of disgust and shame
among the community
• Make community collectively realise the
terrible impact of open defecation
 The sequence of steps
• Pre-triggering
– Selecting a community
– Introduction and building rapport
– Half a day to one week
• Triggering
– Participatory sanitation profile analysis
– Ignition movement
– Within a day
• Post-triggering
– Action planning by community
– Follow up
– 3 weeks to three months
• Scaling up and going beyond
 Pre-triggering
• Selection of village
– Small settlement better
– Socially and culturally homogeneous
– Visibly filthy condition; high incidence of disease
– No overlapping programme (especially subsidy
driven)
• Meet local leaders, village chiefs etc.
– Introduction and rapport building
– Transect walk
• Which families use which areas, where women go,
where to go at night
 Triggering
• Trigger self-realisation among community members
that they need to change their own behaviour
– Draw attention to the flies on the shit
– Chicken pecking and eating shit
• Mapping of defecation areas through PRA
– Map of community to locate households, resources and
problems and stimulate discussion
– Tool for getting all community members involved in
practical and visual analysis of community sanitation
situation
– Community labelling of dirtiest neighbourhood
– Display the map in community building or common place
• Remainder to take action
• Monitoring tool
 Triggering
• Calculation of quantity of shit produces
– Where does all shit go?
– What are the possible effects of having so much shit on
ground
• DO NOT
– Try to convince community to stop open defecation
and start construction of toilets
• Your job is to facilitate good analysis that ignites sense of
disgust and shame
– Lecture or try to educate community about the disease
caused
– Talk about subsidy
– Prescribe model latrines
• May talk about pit toilet if community cannot afford cost
 Triggering
• Desired outcome
– Collective realisation that due to open defecation
everyone is ingesting each other’s faeces and will
continue unless open defecation is stopped
TOTALLY
 Post-triggering
• Action planning
– Form sanitation action group from representative
from all the neighbours of village
– Make list of household, present sanitation status,
develop individual family plans
– Digging pits for makeshift arrangement
– Getting commitments from better-off families
– Looking for suppliers of latrine construction
material
 Post-triggering

• Community action and follow up

– Identify natural leaders emerging from PRA
– Encourage natural leaders to lead and share ideas
– Encourage natural leaders to take charge of
ensuring action plan
– Punishment
• Community might decide on penalty
 Scaling up
• Develop Community Facilitator
– Short training
– Reasonable fee for work
– Facilitator must AVOID ‘educating’ or ‘advising’
– Government or donor agencies or international
NGOs may intervene
• Must recognise to role of community facilitator