Why not Basics for All? Scopes and Challenges of Community?led Total Sanitation

The ‘Some for All’ dictum may work well for the water sector but is not appropriate and workable for the sanitation sector. We live in a paradox of concern for water quality for drinking, while displaying less concern about the haphazard and uncontrolled contamination of the sources of natural water. By contrast, the principle of ‘at least something for all/why not basics for all?’ on which Community?led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is based, leads to collective behaviour change on a grand scale and empowers communities to completely eliminate open defecation and thus protect water bodies as well as improve health and livelihoods outcomes. This is achieved through a process of collective local action with no upfront individual hardware subsidy and no prescribed models. With some 50 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America now adopting the approach, future challenges include sustainability, scaling?up with quality, gaining political buy in and addressing issues concerning environmental health and waste disposal

Subsidy or self-respect? : Participatory total community sanitation in Bangladesh

Access to latrines in rural areas of Bangladesh is less than 15 per cent. Many international agencies and non-governmental organisations have been working to improve environmental sanitation by constructing latrines and toilets with subsidies provided at different rates. But even after three decades of such efforts it is difficult to find 100 villages from amongst nearly 85,000 that are totally sanitised and free from open defecation. Success has generally been measured on the basis of the number of latrines constructed within a given period of time instead of the extent of open defecation, which in most cases has continued unabated. A new approach being pioneered by the author (Dr Kamal Kar, Social and Participatory Development Consultant from Calcutta, India) with Village Education Resource Centre (VERC), Water Aid in Bangladesh and other agencies concentrates on empowering local people to analyse the extent and risk of environmental pollution caused by open defecation, and to construct toilets without any external subsidies. This community-led effort has had a huge impact. Open defecation has been completely stopped by the community in more than 400 villages in Bangladesh, and the methodology is now being adopted in parts of India and elsewhere in Asia and Africa. This new empowering approach towards the provision of services and infrastructure has serious policy implications for other such programmes. Firstly, financial subsidies from agencies should be used to facilitate and enhance community understanding of the risks of open defecation and to train community catalysts that can spread the programme, rather than being used to invest in material and physical infrastructure. Secondly, agencies must employ a flexible approach in working with communities in order to allow the latter to take the lead in addressing problems in their own way, instead of dictating practices. Thirdly, success must be measured on the basis of the final impact (elimination of open defecation) instead of the final output (construction of toilets of externally prescribed designs). This new approach demonstrates the impact a simple facilitative process can have on changing age-old practices, where the onus for progress is placed almost entirely on the community

Subsidy or self-respect? Community led total sanitation. An update on recent developments

Community Led Total Sanitation, or CLTS, is an approach which facilitates a process of empowering local communities to stop open defecation and to build and use latrines without the support of any external hardware subsidy. Since the approach was first pioneered in Bangladesh in 1999 CLTS has continued to spread within that country and many interesting innovations, as well as some important sustainability issues, have emerged. The approach has been introduced in a number of other countries in Asia and in Africa with much success. Interest amongst different institutions is growing, particularly as it is realised that CLTS has a great potential for contributing towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals, both directly on water and sanitation (goal 7) and indirectly through the knock-on impacts of improved sanitation on combating major diseases, particularly diarrhoea (goal 6), improving maternal health (goal 5) and reducing child mortality (goal 4). However, rapid institutional take-up of CLTS has raised some dilemmas and challenges, not least of which is the need for changes in attitudes and mindsets of donors who wish to support and promote CLTS. Reflection on new experiences and lessons is proving important to ensure that the quality and spirit of the approach is maintained and therefore this short update documents recent developments, highlighting emerging innovations, lessons and challenges which enrich the original 2003 Working Paper, which is reprinted after the update. Keywords: sanitation, participation, Bangladesh, update, community, entry-point

Perturbations of spiky strings in AdS3

Perturbations of a class of semiclassical spiky strings in three dimensional Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime, are investigated using the well-known Jacobi equations for small, normal deformations of an embedded timelike surface. We show that the equation for the perturbation scalar which governs the behaviour of such small deformations, is a special case of the well-known Darboux-Treibich-Verdier (DTV) equation. The eigenvalues and eigensolutions of the DTV equation for our case are obtained by solving certain continued fractions numerically. These solutions are thereafter utilised to further demonstrate that there do exist finite perturbations of the AdS spiky strings. Our results therefore establish that the spiky string configurations in AdS3 are indeed stable against small fluctuations. Comments on future possibilities of work are included in conclusion.Comment: 22 pages, 18 figures, minor changes, to appear in JHE

Impact of community-led total sanitation on women’s health in urban slums of Kalyani Municipality

This paper documents the impact of Community led Total Sanitation (CLTS) on women’s health in urban slums of Kalyani Municipality the first open defecation free (ODF) town in India. Women’s health was viewed not only in terms of their physical health status but also their social and psychological well-being. The study also looked at how the process had empowered women and the role of the external environment in stimulating and supporting the change process. The study findings indicate that improved sanitation reduced the disease burden on women and their families, increased their safety and enhanced their social status. It was found that women played a lead role in initiating and driving sanitation and hygiene behaviour change in their communities, placing them in leadership roles and involving them in the decision- making process. This enabled woman to exercise agency in achieving gains beyond sanitation to improve their lives

Creuser, s’implanter et grandir : Introduire l’ATPC en Afrique

Open defecation is the norm in rural and urban Africa – only about a third of the population uses improved sanitation facilities – and this contributes in various ways to a heavy disease burden. Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS), an approach to sanitation which focuses on community-wide behaviour change to completely stop open defecation, began to go to scale in Africa in 2006. Since then, it has spread dramatically and in many countries very successfully, and is now used at some level in at least 26 African countries. This paper draws on the extensive involvement of Kamal Kar with the spread of CLTS in Africa to describe the early stages of the process, to elaborate on its developments and to outline insights into the circumstances and features which have facilitated its rapid spread. Taking a broadly comparative approach which draws on the somewhat earlier experience of the spread of CLTS in Asia, it identifies aspects of the institutionalisation process and circumstances, including key individuals, that have contributed to the success of the approach in Africa. It also discusses challenges, however, noting several issues which may limit its impact and hinder its dissemination. In particular, the paper discusses some of the many adaptations made to CLTS in response to a wide range of pressures, varying country circumstances and strategy choices

Volume Integral Theorem for Exotic Matter

We answer an important question in general relativity about the volume integral theorem for exotic matter by suggesting an exact integral quantifier for matter violating Averaged Null Energy Condition (ANEC). It is checked against some well known static, spherically symmetric traversable wormhole solutions of general relativity with a sign reversed kinetic term minimally coupled scalar field. The improved quantifier is consistent with the principle that traversable wormholes can be supported by arbitrarily small quantities of exotic matter.Comment: 7 page