Water and Sanitation Programme (World Bank)

It is a part of the Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation project of the Water and Sanitation Programme, World Bank and focuses on learning how to combine the approaches of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), behavior change communications, and social marketing of sanitation to generate sanitation demand and strengthen the supply of sanitation products and services at scale, leading to improved health for people in rural areas. This is one in a series of knowledge products designed to showcase project findings, assessments and lessons learned in the project.

Over the last few years, the concept of open-defecation free communities has emerged as one of the building blocks toward achieving total sanitation. The term ‘access’ is widely used to capture increase in sanitation usage. However, a clean environment is a public good. Hence, there was a need to achieve total sanitation at the community level to realize public health benefits. This has led policy makers and practitioners to adopt strategies that achieve community-wide total sanitation status, which includes the community becoming open-defecation free, and adopting safe hygiene and environmental sanitation practices.