Sanitation - Improving Access

Improving Access

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include a target to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. In December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2008 'The International Year of Sanitation', in recognition of the slow progress being made towards the MDGs sanitation target. The year aims to develop awareness and action to meet the target. Particular concerns are:

• Removing the stigma around sanitation, so that the importance of sanitation can be more easily and publicly discussed.
• Highlighting the poverty reduction, health and other benefits that flow from better hygiene, household sanitation arrangements and wastewater treatment.

Research from the Overseas Development Institute suggests that sanitation and hygiene promotion needs to be better 'mainstreamed' in development, if the MDG on sanitation is to be met. At present, promotion of sanitation and hygiene is mainly carried out through water institutions. The research argues that there are, in fact, many institutions that should carry out activities to develop better sanitation and hygiene in developing countries. For example, educational institutions can teach on hygiene, and health institutions can dedicate resources to preventative works (to avoid, for example, outbreaks of cholera). There are also civil society organisations providing the necessary infrastructure where national governments cannot do that on their own. In Ghana, there is an umbrella organisation for those programmes, called CONIWAS (Coalition of NGOs in Water and Sanitation) as reported in the magazine D+C Development and Cooperation.

The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) coordinated research programme on Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a radically different approach to rural sanitation in developing countries and has shown promising successes where traditional rural sanitation programmes have failed. CLTS is an unsubsidized approach to rural sanitation that facilitates communities to recognize the problem of open defecation and take collective action to clean up and become ‘open defecation free’. It uses community-led methods such as participatory mapping and analysing pathways between feces and mouth as a means of galvanizing communities into action. An IDS 'In Focus' Policy Brief suggests that in many countries the Millennium development goal for sanitation is off track and asks how CLTS can be adopted and spread on a large scale in the many countries and regions where open defecation still prevails.