Sanitation
all, supplemented by — often limited — program funds.
Limited budgets, front line workers with less training
and experience, less follow-up, average motivation and
support: over time, the conditions for success move from
“outstanding” to “average,” and so do the results.
Successfully working at scale means planning for scale
from the beginning and understanding better “what
works” in program design and implementation. Some of
the investments of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s
WASH team set out to learn how this could be done.
Scaling up CLTS
For the past five years, Plan International has been
working on a project called “Testing CLTS Approaches for
Scalability,” meant to examine how the use of local actors
could be used to more successfully (and more cheaply)
scale Community-Led Total Sanitation interventions. In
Ghana, this was done by using natural leaders to follow
up at community level, while in Ethiopia school teachers
were used to trigger communities. In each country, the
intervention (“modified” CLTS) was compared with
results from implementation as usual (“standard” CLTS),
so that clear conclusions could be drawn about the causes
of differences in outcomes.
Besides the project-specific country research results (many
of which are available on the project website), we have
additional information from CLTS case studies from seven
countries, published in the CLTS Learning Series.
Meaningfully summarizing the findings here would make
this blog much longer than I’d want it to be and, in any
case, you can find them online. Instea