April 2019
Community-Led Total Sanitation Moves the Needle on Ending Open Defecation in Zambia
Brown, J., Albert, J., Whittington, D. (2019). Community-Led Total Sanitation Moves the Needle on Ending Open Defecation in Zambia. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 100,4: 767-769. doi:10.4269/ajtmh.19-015
ABSTRACT
Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) has emerged as the most widely implemented policy intervention for improving rural sanitation in low-income countries. Community-led total sanitation is focused on the SDG of ending open defecation (OD), still practiced by nearly 900 million people.1 Large-scale CLTS programming is underway in dozens of countries and represents an appealing option to governments and donors, promising reductions in OD and increases in sanitation coverage through community mobilization and collective behavior change, typically without direct subsidies for toilet construction. A rich literature on CLTS has emerged documenting a range of programmatic conditions and experiences and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of CLTS’s potential advantages and limitations.
