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Despite great strides in improving sanitation in developing countries, some 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate sanitation facilities and the poorest and most vulnerable members of society are often not reached. Sustainability is one of the key challenges in CLTS and the wider WASH sector. Whether sanitation improvements endure depend on issues of equity and inclusion, social norms, physical infrastructure, sanitation marketing, monitoring and verification, post-ODF follow-up and the roles and responsibilities of governments, NGOs and donors. The achievement of “open defecation-free” status is now recognised as only the first stage in a long process of change and sanitation improvement.
This book, edited by the Sanitation Learning Hub, examines these challenges, asking questions such as how we ensure that people access sanitation and sustain related behaviours, and how we reach the poorest with toilets that are suitable for their needs. It develops key themes by exploring current experience, innovations and insights, as well as identifying a future research agenda and gaps in current knowledge, and making recommendations and practical suggestions.
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Sharing of experiences and thoughts on addressing climate change impacts on sanitation at a local level are critical to evolving the sanitation sector.
Please note, there is a French translation and a Portuguese translation available.
SDG 6.2 calls for sustainable sanitation for all before 2030. Yet over 2 billion people still lack access to basic sanitation facilities. Ensuring good sanitation and hygiene practices for everybody means ending open defecation, tackling existing challenges with access and use, and ensuring all sanitation facilities are safely managed.
Climate change is an added complexity in an already challenging landscape – it exacerbates these challenges and has cascading effects on health and livelihoods. Climate change impacts disproportionately affect already disadvantaged and marginalised groups, jeopardising efforts to Leave No One Behind in the drive for sanitation and hygiene for all. There is a real risk that progress made in improving rural sanitation access and coverage will slow, or even reverse.
The global sanitation sector has taken initial steps to incorporate responses to climate change into rural sanitation programming and services. However, much of the discussion has focused on technological improvements.
There is limited actionable guidance on how the rural sanitation and hygiene sector can make systemic changes through planning and implementing project delivery, enabling demand, changing behaviour, addressing social norms, monitoring and evaluation, and more at the local level. Furthermore, the voices of vulnerable people, households, and communities who are at the forefront of experiencing climate change impacts on sanitation are largely absent in existing discussions.
This publication aims to address these gaps in rural sanitation and hygiene thinking through:
Rural sanitation practitioners already consider many types of risk in the design and implementation of programmes. This publication supports rural practitioners in civil society and government to add a climate lens to existing programmes. It provides the sector with a menu of options and ideas from a climate change perspective. It is not a prescriptive list or a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
Practitioners can draw on various ideas and parts of this guidance and modify them to suit specific programmatic and regional contexts. The quotes included are from interviews with sanitation and hygiene practitioners. They describe their experience with programming in contexts increasingly challenged by climate related concerns.
The Sanitation Learning Hub's Frontiers of Sanitation series provides practical, evidence-based guidance and recommendations on essential emerging issues and approaches to programming and learning.
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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).