Any development worker worth their salt will tell you there’s a lot more to this water and sanitation stuff than simply building your pit latrine – whether it’s offset* or not.
(* all is revealed in the latrine technology section, for those of you who skipped over it…)
If you want people to think you know what you’
re talking about, you’re going to want to bandy the words “community-led total sanitation” around with a tone of commanding authority.
‘Community-led total sanitation’ was pioneered in Bangladesh by Kamal Kar (a development consultant from India) and the Village Education Resource Centre.
They realised that a band of khaki-clad aid workers pitching up in a community with a 4x4, a load of spades and materials for building loos – did not constitute a successful sanitation programme – because the community were left with a strange looking building that they didn’t know what to do with. In a straight contest between the “it-came-from-out-of-nowhere-latrine”, and the local river – the river won: on the premise of “better the devil you know”. After all, surely there was a danger of falling down the hole in that “new-fangled-latrine-thing-that-came-from nowhere” … not to mention the dodgy smells that came from inside… and the fact that everyone would know what you were up to in there…
Kamal Kar and the Village Education Resource Centre suggested that development workers should encourage people to help themselves. They came up with ‘ community-led total sanitation’ and the idea caught on fast within Bangladesh.
Their guiding principle was to move away from a simple approach of subsidising toilet construction, and, instead, challenge the attitudes and behaviour of the whole community so that they would choose to stop defecating in the open. They encouraged community members to design and build their own latrines – which naturally led to greater ownership, affordability and long-term success.
It’s not rocket science. Doing stuff for other people seldom works. Doing it with them has to be the way forward – which is why Cord and Tearfund both use the community-led total sanitation approach.
