Hello again,
Further to my input below, a related innovation to initiate collective action is the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach (originally from the Institute of Development Studies, Univ. of Sussex, UK), now being up-scaled in Africa, Asia, Latin America. …and our team has earlier managed an end-term evaluation (for WASH Ethiopia).... Merely providing toilets (even highly subsidizing them) does not guarantee their use, nor does it result in improved sanitation and hygiene. Community-Led Total Sanitation focuses on the behavioural change needed to ensure real and sustainable improvements, changing thinking about sanitation from a focus on individual households to whole communities, and from a focus on supplying hardware or technology to looking at how to create collective behaviour change.
In the new innovative approach, ‘’triggering’’ is a key intervention whereby communities are facilitated to conduct their own appraisal and analysis of open defecation and take their own action. … Triggering is based on stimulating a collective sense of disgust and shame among community members as they confront the crude facts about mass open defecation and its negative impacts on the entire community (-- no human being can stay unmoved once they have learnt that they are ingesting other people’s shit).
This requires highly experienced local facilitators, working with locals, walking to where open defecation happens. Typically, the facilitator ask for a glass of drinking water, which everyone may be willing to drink. But then, the facilitator pulls a hair, then touch it on some shit on the ground and then dip the hair in the glass of water, and offer the glass of water to anyone and ask them to drink it. Immediately they will refuse. Indeed, no one will want to drink that water (now that it contains shit). … If flies have six legs, they could pick up even more shit than the hair could. Then, what happens when such flies sit on their or their children’s food and plate.
This reveals a horrific realization of the fact that they are eating one other’s shit. These are very critical moments which hasten the triggering process. Such collective realization thus prompt community action (~ demand created), to build their own toilets (often estimated to cost $100-250). The goal of the facilitator, however, is purely to help community members see for themselves that open defecation has disgusting consequences and creates an unpleasant environment. It is then up to community members to decide how to deal with the problem and to take action, thus providing more sustainable, cost-effective solution to a long standing social problem.
More here
https://sanitationlearninghub.org/practical-support/the-community-led-t…
Regards, Getaneh
Mr. Getaneh Gobezie