CLA CASE ANALYSIS: Deep Dive of Zambia’s Community-Led Total Sanitation Program

As part of its efforts to advance understanding about the effects and effectiveness of collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) in improving development outcomes, The USAID LEARN proect is conducting an in-depth review and comparison of two cases selected from the 2015 and 2016 CLA case competitions.

This deep dive analysis explores Zambia’s Community-Led Total Sanitation Program, implemented by Akros, a Lusaka-based organization. Using CLTS, an approach developed by Kamal Kar (Kar and Chambers 2018) and aligned with the principles of collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA), Akros developed a Mobile-to-Web (M2W) application that facilitated real-time monitoring of progress and began to collaborate more directly with traditional leaders such as chiefs/ chieftainesses and headmen/women.

While Akros employees did not explicitly set out to incorporate CLA per se into their programming, the M2W component of the CLTS program in Zambia, which was funded by UNICEF and not USAID, nevertheless integrated CLA principles.