On Wednesday, December 13, 2017, the USAID-funded Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) Project held a webinar on the role of community-led total sanitation (CLTS) in helping to end open defecation. WASHPaLS presented key findings from a desk review assessing the knowledge base on CLTS program performance. The findings and identified evidence gaps will inform the WASHPaLS research agenda for subsequent years of the project. 

The USAID Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) Project carried out this landscape assessment of information communication technology (ICT) use cases in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector as an initial step toward understanding the demand and potential use for development or customization of a technology solution to support large-scale implementation and/or monitoring of CLTS programs.

For decades, implementers have applied water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and nutrition-based interventions—alone and in a variety of combinations—to address diarrheal disease and stunting among infants and young children (IYC) in low- and middle-income countries. Given the extensive and intensive efforts, why aren’t we seeing more progress?

In what has been termed a revolution of sorts, community-led total sanitation (CLTS) introduced a new approach to eliminating open defecation when it was pioneered by Kamal Kar 17 years ago. Since its introduction, approximately 60 countries have adopted CLTS, a technique which triggers communal disgust to change defecation behaviors and expand sanitation coverage in mostly rural communities. A good number of governments have even embraced CLTS as their national policy.