Sustainability of facilities built under the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) implementation: Moving from basic to safe facilities on the sanitation ladder.

In the context of monitoring progress towards SDG target 6.2, a household is counted to have access to sanitation if it uses at least basic sanitation services. Several approaches have been employed to help rural communities to climb up the sanitation ladder such as Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS), whose primary target is to end open defecation through behavior change. CLTS does not subsidize sanitation facilities, but let households build their own facilities. The types and sustainability of facilities when construction is entrusted to households without guidelines remain understudied. The contribution of CLTS in achieving SDG6.2 also have not been studied. This paper addresses these gaps. Conducted in the province of Sissili in Burkina Faso, our study involved interviewing CLTS implementers, government officials, and community stakeholders. Coupled with household surveys, the data was analyzed using SPSS and Excel software. Findings indicate that CLTS succeeded in motivating households to build latrines hence escalating latrine coverage from 29.51% in 2016 (pre-CLTS) to 90.44% in 2020 (post-CLTS) in the province. However, 97.53% of latrines built were unimproved pit latrines with superstructures and without/with wooden or clay slabs and no roof, of which 19.76% collapsed during the rainy season. During this period, sanitation access rate rose from 11.9% to 17.00%. The study has therefore revealed that CLTS significantly elevates latrine coverage, yet it does not guarantee a proportional rise in sanitation access. This discrepancy results from the type of technologies generated by CLTS, which are not considered in calculating the sanitation access rate due to their unimproved nature. Consequently, further exploration of social approaches is essential, amalgamating technical and engineering aspects. Beyond socio-economic considerations, the sustainability of CLTS and the achievement of access to adequate and safe sanitation also rely on the robustness and resilience of the implemented facilities.

Factors influencing community-led total sanitation (CLTS) implementation abandonment before achieving open defecation-free (ODF) status: case study of the Central-Western region of Burkina Faso.

Access to sanitation has become an important element for improving the health of populations in developing countries. In Burkina Faso, 12% of the population in rural areas has access to latrine and 65% practice open defecation (OD). In a bid to eliminate this unsanitary practice and enhance sanitation access in rural areas, the government embraced community-led total sanitation (CLTS) as a national strategy in 2014. However, more than 6 years later, a notable observation is the high abandonment rate, with only a small fraction of rural communities successfully eradicating OD. Out of the 8892 villages in the country, 3546 underwent a CLTS triggering from 2014 to 2020. Nevertheless, in 787 of these villages, the implementation of the CLTS approach was abandoned, indicating a substantial abandonment rate of 22.19%. Until now, most studies on CLTS have focused on the post-ODF phase, emphasizing the question of the sustainability of the results generated by the approach, as if the process from triggering to obtaining ODF certification was not subject to any problems. However, cases of abandonment of the CLTS process after triggering do exist, although poorly documented in the literature, and there are no studies that clearly assign responsibilities to the actors when CLTS implementation comes to be abandoned. This research aims to bridge these gaps by identifying the root causes of these abandonment cases while delineating the distinct responsibilities associated with these instances. To achieve this, the study was conducted in the Central-Western region of Burkina Faso, where all stakeholders involved in CLTS implementation, including target communities, were identified, their different roles in the process defined, and data collected through household surveys, interviews, and focus groups. The content analysis method was used to analyze the data. The research findings indicate that the abandonment of the CLTS implementation process is due to four categories of factors: sociocultural and economic aspects (39.78%), physical conditions (17.52%), governance aspects (26.28%), and the quality of approach implementation (16.42%). Moreover, these factors highlight a shared accountability for abandonment involving the government, implementing organizations, and target communities. These findings have significant implications for the future design of sanitation programs using the CLTS approach. To mitigate abandonment rates in the CLTS implementation process across rural communities, it is imperative for policymakers to attentively consider these factors and integrate the recommendations delineated in this study.

Review of the slippage factors from open defecation-free (ODF) status towards open defecation (OD) after the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach implementation.

Open-defecation (OD) is one of the most widespread sanitation practices in low-income countries. This practice often causes diarrheal diseases and 760,000 deaths per year. To eradicate OD, several approaches have been developed, including Community-Led-Total Sanitation (CLTS) which is a participatory and community approach. The specificity of CLTS is that it is managed by the community itself, as its name implies, and that no subsidies or financial contributions from outside the community are used in the construction of the facilities. Although, the CLTS is effective in the short-term for eradicating OD, the long-term results are not encouraging: Open-Defecation-Free (ODF) communities revert to OD or partially use latrines. The present research is based on literature review and authors investigation in Burkina Faso. It was conducted to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors that affect the sustainability of ODF-status leading to slippage in communities. It was found that these factors can be grouped into five categories: behavioral and social, technological, organizational, and vulnerability factors. The last one, socio-political factors, is a contribution from the authors as it was not reported in the literature yet. The authors have proposed graphical synthesis of all the slippage factors and their associated categories in the ODF-communities. Finally, authors have suggested that to sustain ODF-status of communities: include all stages of the sanitation value chain (SVC) in the CLTS, the follow-up activities after achieving ODF-status must be planned well in advance, sanitation marketing should be developed and the sanctions against the practice of OD have to be reinforced. Governments and donors should pay particular attention to the following options: raising awareness and regular monitoring after ODF certification, encouraging research on sustainable and pro-poor sanitation technologies, and building the capacity of implementing actors including facilitators. While obtaining ODF status is materialized by a sign with the status on it, this paper drew the attention of CLTS implementers to the lack of materialization of slippage when it occurs, and the absence of studies on the evolution of the community sanitation scale after ODF-status.