Sanitation
Sanitation for all: Scaling up is hard to do
By Jan Willem Rosenboom
A school teacher leads a community-led total sanitation activity in Ethiopia. Photo by: Plan International / Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation
If you invest even a little bit of your time in keeping on
top of developments in the water, sanitation and hygiene
sector, you will have seen at least some of the blogs,
reports and articles reminding us all that the world failed
to attain the Millennium Development Goals’ sanitation
targets — by a wide margin.
The Sustainable Development Goals give us a second
chance to get it right, but they seriously up the ante.
Instead of “merely” providing half of the unserved
population with access to improved sanitation, as the
MDGs required, the SDGs tell us we can only declare
success once every person, every school and every health
facility has — and uses — safely managed sanitation
facilities.
We have 15 years to get it right. Given the below-average
results we obtained in the past 15 years, it is clear that we
should ask some hard questions and examine the evidence
emerging from the field, in the hope we can do much
better in the next 15 years.
Pilots never fail, and never scale
Anywhere in the world, if we look hard enough, we can
find successful, innovative projects changing people’s lives
for the better — and not only in sanitation; this is true for
every sector.
The assumption that successful pilots will — by some
unexamined magic — lead to sustained scale up efforts is
mostly false and, as a result, we seem stuck with repeated
small-scale successes, rather than impact at scale. In the
past I have labeled this observation “Rosenboom’s law on
pilots:” Pilots never fail, and never scale.
Intuitively, this makes some sense. For pilot (or
demonstration) projects, we select the most responsive
communities, with the most supportive leadership. We
use the best front line workers we can find, and there is
frequent follow up from the (international) organization
supporting the pilot. This is a recipe for success.
Making the transition from pilot to scale, however,
changes everything. This requires political buy-in first of
Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • May - June 2016
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