Community Led Total Sanitation

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is an unsubsidized approach to rural sanitation that facilitates communities to recognize the problem of open defecation and take collective action to clean up and become ‘open defecation’ free. It is based on the premise that a community can become open defecation free (ODF) only when all its members genuinely feel a need for sanitary toilets and are not pressurized to do so. It allows the communities to conduct their own analysis, come to their own conclusions and take their own action.

How it is different from Traditional Programmes?

• Unlike traditional programmes, it does not involve providing subsidies for individual household hardware. Triggering is the vital core of CLTS. Facilitators convene communities and through participatory mapping of households and defecation areas (and by walking through these areas) the problem of ‘shitting in the open’ is quickly made visible.
• They also run exercises that are aimed to shock and disgust. For instance, they analyze the pathways between shit and mouth.
• Acts like these lead to moments of ‘ignition’ when natural leaders speak up and resolve to take action. Whole communities are subsequently galvanised into action.

Potential of CLTS

• The above discussion makes it clear that it is a radically different approach to rural sanitation and has shown promising successes where traditional rural sanitation programmes have failed. This is mainly because traditional programmes have failed to reach those they set out to help at the first place. While they seek to provide standard subsidized hardware to individual households, it is mostly the better-off elites who have managed to capture the subsidies.
• CLTS on the other hand, is radically different in the sense that it provides unconventional facilitation, without any subsidies for hardware. In the process communities also recognize that they are eating one another’s shit and decide to take collective action to clean up and become ODF, digging and building simple pit latrines to their own designs. Some may at first share latrines and others improve existing unhygienic ones.
• Thus it offers a beacon of hope for better rural sanitation with resulting gains for millions of people affected by open defecation. It is expected that all will stand to benefit, especially children, women and girls, not only through better sanitation and well-being, but also through privacy, convenience and menstrual hygiene.

Initiatives Taken

• While CLTS was pioneered by Kamal Kar in Bangladesh in 1999, it has been introduced in more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. It has been introduced in Rajasthan in India too, where it s part of the collaboration between the Rajasthan government and UNICEF. It is hoped that here too progress will be dramatic, leading to hundreds if not thousands of communities galvanised into action with a remarkable acceleration of the construction and use of latrines, and with communities being proudly declared ODF.