Many Interesting Discussions Are Arising As a Result of These Presentations. Common Challenges

Day 2: 16th November 2010

Petra, IDS, UK
We spent the whole afternoon of the first day and the morning of Day 2 on country presentations. Each group gave an overview of where CLTS is at in their country, including a time line, achievements, challenges, how challenges are being addresses, and any studies, publications or other relevant resources for further information. All this without use of powerpoint!!!

Many interesting discussions are arising as a result of these presentations. Common challenges include

• Follow up
• Monitoring, verification and reporting systems
• Natural leaders- how to support them?
• Trainers: demand for good trainers is higher than supply at present
• Rewards and incentives- if any, what kind and to whom?
• How to create and support full time CLTS staff?
• How to institutionalise CLTS?

Some interesting things I picked up:

Seasonality was a subject touched on by several presenters: Triggering at the wrong time can impact on the outcomes and sustainability of CLTS. For example, in many countries it is advisable to catch people after the harvest when they have more resources and money and also before the rainy season starts.

In Zambia traditional leaders have played a key role in taking CLTS forward. A prime example is Chief Macha who won the AfricaSan Awards last year for his leadership in CLTS in Zambia. It was interesting to hear that the Chief’s Act explicitly commands chiefs to play a role in their communities’ sanitation: ‘The chief shall ensure that subjects of his chiefdom have proper sanitation’. The Chief’s Act has been used as a reminder to chiefs to take up their responsibility and get involved. Hearing the chiefs talk about shit also acts as an encouragement to communities: ‘if the chief can say shit, then it’s ok for us to also start using these words’. The Zambian group also alluded to the problem of urban sanitation- there is more urban shit than rural and it brings unique challenges with it, eg rented houses, slum settings etc. People are also not as open to CLTS and being facilitated as in rural areas. A Zambian CLTS manual has been developed which comprises 4 modules: CLTS, SLTS, legal enforcement in urban sanitation and data management- I will try to get hold of this and upload it on the website soon.

Following after the Zambia presentation, the team from Uganda wondered if they could also involve traditional chiefs in their CLTS programmes. Follow up after ODF and data management were named as key challenges.

In Zimbabwe the National WASH group is working on a national sanitation and hygiene strategy which will possibly include CLTS but under a different name. Several names have come up including Community-led Incremental Sanitation.

An interesting tool/strategy in Nigeria were women and children’s rallies and there will be a film on this screened this evening- so more on this to follow. The Nigeria group also emphasized the need for champions at all levels.

In Liberia, there are monthly meetings at the level of the 15 counties to keep the process well connected and facilitate good relationships between the different players. One challenge is decentralisation: at national government level involvement is strong but at present, there is not much happening at decentralised county level.

Sierra Leone talked about its CLTS Taskforce with 45 members who are involved in monitoring and advocacy and moves around the different districts. A peer group monitoring mechanism is being used.

It was remarked how rapidly Sierra Leone’s progress with CLTS has been. At the Mombasa meeting in March 2009, very little had happened in Sierra Leone, but now it is probably the leading country in the West Africa region in terms of CLTS progress.

The Sierra Leone presentation triggered an interesting discussion on the role of Natural Leaders. Who are they? How can they be supported? What are their motivations? Should they receive rewards and in what form? In Sierra Leone Natural Leaders do receive rewards in the form of bicycles which allow them to move more easily between communities and to also trigger neighbouring villages. However, it seemed like just as important as this material reward is the increase in status in their own communities which follows from the recognition of their efforts, eg through certificates, T-shirts, and by being featured in UNICEF’s quarterly WASH newsletter.

The presentation from Eritrea triggered a discussion about the ratio between triggered communities and ODF communities. In Eritrea and some other countries, the difference between the number of triggered communities and those that have become ODF seems quite high. This is an issue to explore further. Is there a danger of people getting carried away with triggering without following up properly?

In Ghana a key challenge is harmonising the CLTS approach used by different players in the sector. At present, there has been limited knowledge sharing between different actors. To overcome this, the Technical Working Group is currently working on a national strategy that will help to facilitate better coordination and collaboration.

Malawi also picked up on issues of coordination and harmonisation of resources. Ulemu Chiluzi from Plan: ‘if you want to move it’s good to move in a group, if you are moving in a group, you can’t say that you are just gonna move in your own way- everyone has to move together’. The need for different actors to talk to each other, pool their resources and move forward together as CLTS is being taken to scale was again emphasised.
Next week, a training in Malawi will aim to take CLTS to the remaining 14 districts where CLTS has not yet been implemented.

The presentation also raised an important issue surrounding verification of ODF that echoed concerns from other countries. Districts claiming high ODF numbers may have different criteria for ODF status than those with low numbers: For example, those claiming to have lots of ODF communities may only be looking at latrine coverage as a criterion, whereas others with relatively low ODF numbers have included many more criteria that communities have to meet in order to be declared ODF, eg containment of animal faeces, etc. So low numbers of ODF villages does not always equal that the work being done is not good.

Sharon, Plan Netherlands
One of the things that popped up in different country reports that were presented was the triggering versus ODF. Attention was paid to the fact that the number of ODF-villages was rather low compared to the number of villages triggered. Several questions popped up:

Is there an average on this?
Does it depend on the right time to trigger?
On the National Leaders?
On the means of verification?
On the M&E system?

Discussion that followed focused on the different key issues that need to be taken into account and this will be further discussed this coming week. It will sure be interesting to learn more on this!

Jolly Ann, EWB, Malawi
The second day of the CLTS learning workshop started with the conclusion of the country presentations. These presentations highlighted some of the key achievements in CLTS as well as the challenges faced by each country. The most striking feature of these presentations were the trends that emerged between each country with regards to implementation challenges, which paved the way for the in-depth discussions that were held for the rest of the day.

One of the common challenges faced by the group was the gap between villages triggered and ODF achievement. In Malawi, we are averaging at less than 30% ODF success rate for our triggered villages. Jane Bevan from UNICEF mentioned that in the countries in Western Africa, the success rate is between 20-30%. We all agreed that in CLTS, we can do much better than this; we thus committed ourselves to exploring this topic further during the week. Specifically, we’re going to explore the factors that contribute to ODF achievement and those which cause stagnation. As Carol from Plan Uganda mentioned, “We as a group must assess what the enabling factors are which lead to ODF achievement.” Are they issues of poor training, poor facilitation, inadequate follow-ups, poor local level management, or another issue that we are not currently aware of? Or perhaps it’s a combination of multiple factors. We hope to have the answers to these questions over the next few days.

Post-triggering support, specifically follow-ups, were cited as a key factor for ODF achievement. In Choma district (Zambia), over the last 2.5 years they have focused on achieving ODF in a couple of chiefdoms before scaling up to other parts of the country. No further villages are to be triggered until these chiefdoms achieve ODF status. With this strategy, they have declared one chiefdom ODF, that of Chief Macha’s (the Zambian champion for CLTS and recipient of the AfriSan award for his efforts in sanitation). In addition, another chiefdom is very close to being declared ODF, with 240 out of the 246 villages already ODF and the rest on their way to being ODF soon. We can all learn a lot from Choma district on how to improve our follow-ups for CLTS. I’m excited to go to the field tomorrow to see the sanitation improvements firsthand.

Focus group discussions were held on some of the topics that we as a group deemed important. Today, there were discussions on verification standards, CLTS M&E and ICTs (information and communication technologies), re-triggering/reinvigorating previously triggered communities, and school led-total sanitation (SLTS). I’ll leave it to IDS to publish the details of these sessions. The main take-away for me though was that CLTS is a new approach and a lot of improvements can be made in the near future to increase its potential for impact. For example, in my focus group on CLTS M&E and ICTs, we left with the conclusion that CLTS M&E is at its early stages and indicators for success have yet to be fully established. The question of whether a curriculum on M&E should be included in the trainings was raised, with positive responses from the group. For the verification discussion, a question that emerged was how to make the verification process participatory so that the community owns their success. For re-triggering previously triggered communities, the Nigerian participants stressed the importance of assessing the root cause of stagnation in previously triggered villages in order to formulate appropriate re-triggering/reinvigoration interventions (the term re-triggering was contentious). The SLTS group also came up with some interesting questions, one of which was how to balance the need to meet safety standards for sanitation facilities in schools with the need for the school community to take charge of their own sanitation situation and build their own facilities from locally available materials.

The Kenya team presented a video on urban CLTS, “Story ya Shonde” (meaning Story of Shit). It seems like they’re making great progress with this and tackling the issue on a holistic level, involving not only the people in these communities but also government sectors which have a key role to play in ensuring sanitation is achieved in urban slums.

Overall, lots of food for thought on this second day. Am looking forward to the field visit tomorrow, minus the 6am meeting time ;) Glad I’m in good company for the 4 hour bus ride to Choma!

Petra, IDS, UK

Me again...at the risk of duplicating some of what the other’s have said, here a few bits from the rest of the day. In the afternoon we discussed some of the emerging key issues in groups. Each group presented back in plenary using the questions ‘What have we learned?’ and ‘What needs to be done?’ as a structure.

On the topic of Verification, all agreed that strict verification procedures are vital. The group’s members related various examples from their experience. For example, common indicators used during verification included: is there a foot path to toilet, does the toilet have a cover, is there a handwashing facility, is the floor wet, are there signs of use, is ash being used to stop the smell and/or to wash hands?

A key question was who should do the verification: someone external or the community themselves? Several participants argued that in order to be sustainable, verification needed to be community led and that this would also sit best with the fact that CLTS is a community-led approach! But how exactly can verification be done in a participatory manner? From Plan Kenya we heard that they started by having a meeting with the community and asking them ‘Why do you think you are ODF?’ Then, Plan visited the community and had a good look around together with community representatives. After that, another meeting took place at which the community was asked whether, based on what they had observed during the visit, they still thought they were ODF? In quite a few cases, the community themselves turned out to be stricter judges than external people and maintained that further work was needed before declaring themselves ODF!!!

Others argued that verification should be done by independent external visitors, who would come to the community unannounced. Yet another participant talked about a three stage verification which included self- assessment by communities, then a visit from a district team and finally verification by regional or state level actors.

Robert (Chambers) emphasised that if many communities failed during a verification exercise, this should be seen as positive as it was probably a sign that the verification had been strict and the results were more realistic!

A number of countries mentioned that they had devised verification manuals- will see if I can get hold of them and share them here.

Many exciting things happening with ICTs for M&E - though still in its infancy, there seems to be huge potential. Kenya is leading the way, with two sanitation focused projects using mobile phones for reporting data from the field- one by Ministry of Public Health, the other a pilot project by Plan Kenya.

Wide agreement that what is needed in the area of ICTs and M&E in relation to CLTS is more knowledge and a lot of capacity building! Important questions are: What are we going to use the data for? How does the data inform decision-making? Whose data is it? Does the community own the data and get something out of it?

In order to make sense of the gathered data, it’s vital to gather baseline data, but in most participants’ experience this does not always happen and can make M&E tricky – many positive experiences and improvements can get lost if there is no baseline data. Sammy Musyoki suggested that the initial mapping/triggering gives some baseline data, eg- how many households, how many toilets etc.

Tomorrow we are off to Choma district to visit communities in two chiefdoms- one of them Chief Macha’s! Will be good to have a change of scene, get away from the airconditioning and into the sun, and meet those directly involved in CLTS on the ground. Our various groups will be led by different stakeholders: women and children; headmen; chiefs; the Sanitation Action Group (SAG); technocrats; and civic leaders.