I’ve had two nice emails in response to my CLTS blog of 27 October. Here’s an excerpt from one − from sometime who works for an NGO/charity in southwest England:
CLTS is excellent when it mobilises people, but to expect them to dig their own pits and use locally available material to construct a covering is absolutely absurd. And then do the same thing again when nobody is around to encourage them! In Sierra Leone they are telling people to build pit toilets in a flood area. Goodness knows what happened to common sense.
The other was from a Health & Sanitation Specialist working for the Rural Village Water Resources Management Project in Nepal − here’s a quote:
After one year most of the pit latrines were unused, unimproved and [people were not] motivated to rebuild the same; so we changed model and technology which found success − people's willingness to pay for choices are found for pour flush, easier to clean, looks fancy and available at local market. However, for same standard of latrine poorest of poor need to be financially supported by local governments and other in kind.
Stopping open defecation is just not enough. So I think what’s needed is not CLTS but CLGS − community-led good sanitation. Something to mull over, anyway!
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.