How to Trigger for Handwashing with Soap
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Handwashing is a vital part of good sanitation and hygiene. When Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and its aim of ODF (open defecation free) communities are fully understood and put into practice it is clear that handwashing is implicit in the approach. Without addressing handwashing and other hygiene practices, communities can never become fully ODF since CLTS aims to cut all faecal-oral contamination routes. However, in practice, the degree to which handwashing is integrated into triggering and follow up, depends on the quality of facilitation. This guide, developed in Malawi, addresses the need for specific tools that help to incorporate handwashing into CLTS.
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A team of researchers from the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) knowledge hub at the Institute of Development Studies, WaterAid and Praxis adopted an Immersive Research Approach (IRA) to try to gain in-depth understanding of ground realities and community perspectives relevant for the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin (SBM-G). They sought to learn and be open to emerging findings, while keeping a focus on behaviour change.
This note describes what they did, what they learnt, challenges they faced, and lessons and guidance for its use by others.
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These guidance notes intend to inform and support all who seek to sponsor, convene, facilitate and report on Rapid Action Learning (RAL) workshops anywhere in India and to contribute to the quality, sustainability and timely implementation of the national Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin (SBM-G) campaign (this translates to clean India mission).
They are primarily for districts convened at divisional level but can also be adapted for blocks at district level and drawn on for workshops at state and national levels. They draw on the approach, methods and lessons learnt so far through previous RAL workshops in India.
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This blog originally appeared on the Institute of Development Studies website.
Do we really need debiasing, yet another word? Yes, unless anyone can improve on it, because we need a word to describe a rigorous discipline we development professionals need for grounded realism. This has been coming on me slowly. But now explorations and ‘aha!’ moments in India have accumulated and combined into an epiphany. For me, things will never be the same again. Let me explain.
The biases of rural development tourism are old news. These are biases in brief rural visits from urban centres. They were a collective discovery and articulation at IDS in the early 1980s. They have now receded into the mists of history and been largely forgotten. Few in later generations of development professionals have heard of them. But with rapid change, they are now more relevant than ever.
The biases are spatial (main tarmac road, roadside, accessible from an urban centre…) , project (special villages and places where there are projects, good things to show, contacts…..), person (males, elite, adults, government and NGO staff….), seasonal (during the dry season, not the rains…), professional (questions and curiosity limited to specialised professional mindsets and interests) and diplomatic (being tactful, not inquiring about sensitive subjects) and (an addition since the 1980s) security (confined to places considered safe, and limited to those accessible in daylight….).
The biases interlock and reinforce each other to exclude those people who are most remote, powerless, vulnerable, poor, stigmatised, discriminated against – those whom the SDGs are not to leave behind. With the intensifying capital trap – being stuck in a capital city or urban centre by meetings, emails, visitors, demands for accountability, reporting, and the like – the biases combine now more wickedly than ever.
And there is a new distorting influence to add: competitive campaigns. This is high profile campaigns in which districts and organisations compete to achieve, and to be seen to have achieved, more than others. This last bias is striking with the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin in India, the impressively massive and hugely ambitious campaign driven by political commitment and priority which seeks to make rural India open defecation free by 2 October 2019.
Systemically, with almost every brief rural visit, there is a special reason for where the visitor is taken, who is met, what is said and what is shown. This is most brazen with atypical model communities such as the Millennium villages in African countries. It is also manifest in visits to successful projects, or where the Government or an NGO works or has contacts, somewhere easily accessible and so on. This leads to a scattered archipelago of islands of special cases and contacts that are seen, studied, quoted, and then quoted again and again back and forth by visitors, with the authority of their personal experience of rural, or for that matter urban, reality.
Visiting these islands is better than not visiting at all. But it results not in representative ground truth but in a take-off through repetition into sustainably biased myth. The expanses of sea between the scattered islands are overlooked, unvisited and unexplored, but are many times larger, and more typical, than the islands. Even those who demand representative rigour in statistics are themselves through such visits systemically vulnerable to grossly unrepresentative views of reality. And all this is accentuated when there are competitive target-driven campaigns.
We need a systematic, timely and cost-effective approach offsetting the biases and for finding and exploring the seas between the islands. Here is what, again and again, I have found works astonishingly well, and far better than one might suppose.
Using this approach here is a tiny sample of what I have stumbled on in India. All happened to be in States or Districts that had been declared open defecation free (ODF). Except for one that was affluent and exceptional being on a main road, all were very far from ODF.
The point of these is not to denigrate the programme but to illustrate how the vast sea can differ from the scattered archipelago normally visited.
So let me invite all, yes all, development professionals who see this to look in the mirror and be wary of visits which systemically reinforce misperceptions and generate and sustain myths. Ring fence days for you to ground truth through de-biasing. It is fulfilling, informative, fascinating and fun, to explore, to meet people casually, to wander, observe, ask, listen and gain new insights. Every single de-biasing visit I have done has made me wonder – will it happen again? Will I learn anything new this time? Will there be aha moments? Or will this be a wasted day? And every time, every single time, I have been startled and provoked by unexpected revelations. This has always happened. The insights have been intense and memorable, and the implications for policy, practice and research significant. The use of time has been extraordinarily cost-effective.
So let me challenge all fellow professionals who are engaged with rural or urban development – in government organisations, NGOs, training and research institutes, academics, the media, and funding agencies – all who have the scope to do so – to de-bias. Let me challenge all who can to encourage or require others in their organisations to do likewise. Escape the cognitive trap and help your colleagues to escape theirs. Be a devil. Straight away ring-fence a de-biasing day for yourself. Be systematically rigorous. De-bias, enjoy and tell others what you did and what you learnt.
Inspired to take up the challenge? For a useful reminder, download and print A systematic approach to debiasing, instructions from Robert Chambers
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This publication responds to the demand for guidance on how to conduct training of community-led total sanitation (CLTS) facilitators. The fast spread of CLTS to now over 40 countries means that the demand for good facilitators and trainers of facilitators currently outstrips supply. As CLTS requires a special kind of facilitation, it also calls for a different type of training of facilitators. Training always has to be hands-on, in real time, through triggering in communities and lead to emergence of open defecation free (ODF) villages.
The guide includes much useful information on how to organise and conduct CLTS training of facilitators, as well as how to follow-up, and thereby hopes to spread good practice. It is intended for immediate use by trainers around the world. It will also be helpful for those who manage and supervise trainers and facilitators in terms of giving them insight into the different ways CLTS facilitation and training work, allowing them to appreciate the flexibility, specific support needs and special ways of working that CLTS entails.
The Trainers’ Guide encourages trainers to innovate as appropriate and to add to the core principles and practices outlined in this manual.
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These tools include manuals and practical guides for project managers and trainers working mainly in eastern and southern Africa.
Topics include:
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Community-Leave No One Behind (CLNOB) is a new participatory approach to identify both challenges and solutions in communities’ journeys towards ODF-S.
It has been designed to be integrated into Phase II of the Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen (SBM-G). The government of India has issued the guidelines for Phase II of SBM-G, of which one of the guiding principles is ensuring that no one is left behind. CLNOB demonstrates a way to achieve this goal. It encourages communities to identify gaps in sanitation coverage and use and promote actions they can take themselves.
CLNOB builds on experiences with Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and with the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin (SBM-G)’s ‘Community Approaches to Sanitation (CAS)’. These approaches have helped communities towards achieving open defecation free (ODF) environments; however, it has been acknowledged that ODF status has deficiencies.
The purposes of this handbook are two-fold: first to inform policymakers and stakeholders at all levels about this new initiative, and second to provide guidance to facilitators and practitioners for CLNOB implementation. This handbook is a living document and will be updated and refined after more field experiences are conducted. It is based on limited experience from a small pilot carried out between June and October 2020 during the challenging environment of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Annexes on suggested talking points, a sustainability register, case studies and information on informed consent and data protection, click here to download (PDF).
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An intentional focus on gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) is key to sustainable and effective Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) projects.
This guidance is for staff of WASH implementation and research projects and organisations, who are committed to improving the practice of GESI in their projects and organisations.
What is this tool for? To support individual and collective reflective practice among staff on the extent and quality of gender equality and social inclusion work in their WASH projects and organisation.
Who should use this tool? Anyone working on WASH implementation or research projects that wants to improve (GESI) practice.
Who needs to be involved in the process?
How long does the process take?
This publication is also available in French and Portuguese: