Bangladesh is a hub of sanitation experimentation and model-building. It is internationally recognised as the place where Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) first succeeded in eliminating open defecation (OD) from whole villages. This and other achievements rest on a broad foundation. After briefly reviewing the history of sanitation promotion in rural Bangladesh, this paper summarises the most urgent issues and challenges related to sustaining the country’s achievements in 2015. It concludes with some learning points of possible interest to other countries seeking to promote universal sanitation coverage.
Learning Points from the Bangladesh Sanitation Experience:
- one learning point from the generally successful Sanitation Campaign of 2003-2006 is the importance of combining governmental and community mobilisation strategies. For a sanitation campaign to succeed, it has to come from the head of government and community people need to understand the health benefits of hygienic latrine use
- The union is the most appropriate administrative level for capacity-building in Bangladesh, according to many of those we interviewed
- NGOs are a prominent part of the Bangladesh sanitation scene. Some are huge and working on large-scale sanitation issues. They cannot replace governmental institutions, however. It is only government that has the full-scale authority and responsibility – and some steady revenue
stream, however limited – to protect public health by sustaining 100 per cent latrine usage - while it is not as geographically or culturally diverse as India, Bangladesh does have plenty of diversity. The learning point here is that different areas require different approaches, both technical and social. This is another argument in favour of community mobilisation strategies
- subsidies of some sort are part of the Bangladesh picture. In the long run the poorest households cannot maintain their concrete latrines, much less move up the sanitation ladder, without some kind of outside help
- an important gap in the Bangladesh situation is the lack of routine monitoring of sanitation coverage or quality. The government seems too complacent in accepting the Joint Monitoring Program’s 2014 report of ‘three per cent OD’. Three per cent is a positive finding, but it is not
helpful to focus on this news instead of arranging to monitor the country’s sanitation status more properly - the most important learning point ten years after the Sanitation Campaign is that: sanitation improvement is a continual process. It is never finished. New households are formed, and new houses are built. Floods and cyclones come. Concrete breaks. Rats eat bamboo pit liners. Pits fill up. Migrant labourers come in large numbers to help with the harvest. There always will be new problems to solve, new leaders to educate. The Bangladesh experience has shown that declaring thousands of villages as open defecation free (ODF) is just the beginning