Keeping Track: CLTS Monitoring, Certification and Verification

Monitoring, verification and certification are critical elements of the CLTS process and contribute to ensuring sustainability of ODF as well as learning about changes that are needed to improve implementation. Monitoring includes both process and progress monitoring. Verification tends to be led by NGOs or government with clear criteria and methodologies being developed, often incorporating multiple assessment visits over an extended period of time. Certification and celebration of ODF communities acknowledge their achievement and helps to raise awareness in the surrounding areas. The adoption of CLTS as a national approach in many countries has resulted in national protocols and guidance documents as well as various methodologies for community engagement and data collection to aid the processes of monitoring, verification and certification. Increasingly, the importance of post ODF monitoring is being recognised. We need to know more about how to incorporate this into implementation to ensure longer term sustainability of behaviour change and of toilets. Similarly, effective collection, management and utilisation of data are a challenge. Other emerging issues relate to reliability and accuracy of monitoring and verification; encouraging appropriate attitudes to encourage learning rather than fault finding; and how to incentivise staff involved in monitoring and verification. We also need to know more about monitoring for long term sustainability of behaviour change and inclusion. Many of these issues are being investigated through local, national and international learning processes.Sid

Tracking Progress and Sustainability: Monitoring, Verification and Certification of CLTS

Monitoring, verification and certification are essential for ensuring the success and sustainability of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) efforts. Monitoring assesses and documents progress towards and the sustainability of Open Defecation Free (ODF) status. Verification and certification provide a goal for communities and help implementing agencies and governments to ensure consistency and reliability of desired outcomes. This Learning Brief considers the issues and challenges that are emerging around monitoring, verification and certification as CLTS is being used at scale. Whilst there has been progress, significant gaps in practice still remain. These would benefit from further innovation and lesson learning. This document complements a longer report, Keeping Track: CLTS Monitoring, Certification and Verification, accessible at http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/resource/keepingtrack-clts-monitoring-certification-and-verification .Sid

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

The Addis Agreement: Using CLTS in peri-urban and urban areas

The CLTS Knowledge Hub with the support of Plan International Ethiopia, convened a three day workshop focusing on ‘Using a CLTS Approach and Tools in Peri-Urban and Urban Environments’ in Addis Ababa in June 2016. Over the course of three days participants from across the world and different organisations shared their experiences with urban CLTS and discussed what added value a CLTS approach in the urban context could bring. This Learning Paper has two purposes. It can be read as a record of the different discussions that took place. However, it is much more than a workshop report. Based on practical examples of what has worked it highlights the key stages of any urban CLTS programme. Furthermore, it provides guidance, advice and experiences of these different stages. Its purpose is not a guide but the beginnings of a toolbox for those interested in following a similar approach

Using a CLTS Approach in Peri-Urban and Urban Environments: Potential at Scale

This note summarises the potentials and limitations of using a CLTS approach in peri-urban and urban environments. It identifies the actions needed to take the approach to scale. It is one output from a workshop convened by the CLTS Knowledge Hub at the Institute of Development Studies, and Plan International Ethiopia in Addis Abba between June 13th-15th 2016. A more detailed report can be found on the CLTS Knowledge Hub website: www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/resource/using-clts-approach-peri-urban-and-urban-environmentsThis series is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida)

Research on the current state of PRS monitoring systems

This report reviews recent literature on monitoring Poverty Reduction Strategies. It discusses four challenging areas: institutional arrangements; the role of non-government organisations; implementation and intermediate output monitoring; and using results. The main findings are: • Severe capacity constraints are not sufficiently acknowledged. International agencies should be less ambitious about what can be achieved and in what time frame. • The “technical secretariats”, responsible for implementing monitoring, are of central importance. Their need for analytical skills is widely acknowledged, but expertise in data management, communication and marketing are also necessary. • Building cooperation between ministries and agencies responsible for producing data is proving difficult. Success often depends on the status, capabilities and personalities of key people, not on formal mandates and frameworks. • Unless countries have strong local monitoring systems, it is hard to see that building local PRS monitoring capacity should be an immediate priority, given the magnitude of this task. • There is often confusion about the role of civil society in government monitoring systems. It is important that all stakeholders are aware of the involvement offered and that sufficient thought is given to the capacity, information access and influence required for civil society to perform their role. • The “chains of causality” between policies and outcomes remain problematic. This leads to problems in identifying appropriate intermediate indicators. Given scarce resources, a focus on monitoring budget allocations – linked to a small set of basic provision indicators – may be a reasonable and realistic starting point. • Administrative data provide essential information, but often not of sufficient quality for PRS monitoring. It is worth exploring possibilities for combining them with other sources to generate “best estimates”. • Demand for PRS monitoring information, other than to meet donor requirements, is often very weak. Monitoring systems must include marketing and communication activities to build this demand. Keywords: PRSPs, monitoring, evaluation, participatory processes, poverty assessments, institutional reform, decentralisation, poverty indicators. The findings of the fieldwork support the hypothesis that communities exposed to the risk of civil war consciously take rational courses of action over their assets to confront the adverse effects of the war. One apparent policy implication that arises from this is that communities exposed to civil war consciously manage their assets, it is possible to pursue poverty programmes during conflict in order to support the innovative household assets management strategies as well as addressing the underlying sources of grievance and horizontal inequality. While such programmes may not be relevant to communities exposed to endogenous counterinsurgency warfare, they are appropriate to support assets management strategies adopted by households exposed to exogenous counterinsurgency warfare