Over the decades we have been working in the water sector, it has evolved dramatically. In the early days sanitation was not prioritised and as such the benefits of the safe water are unlikely to have been fully realised. Indeed sanitation was only included in the Millennium Development Goals as an afterthought, some years after they were drawn up. We have always included a degree of sanitation in our programmes but over the course of the last decade, we have come to see it as equal to, if not more important than the provision of water itself.

Community Led Total Sanitation – after years of trying to change communities’ behaviour towards sanitation through instruction, our team in the field decided to try implementing Community Led Total Sanitation instead. CLTS, as it is known, was first developed in Bangladesh by Kamal Kar. It works on the principle that communities should be shown, without a forced agenda, the extent of their open defecation and the ramifications of this. Shock tactics are used to engender a sense of disgust amongst villagers at their own behaviour. These include using the word “shit” to describe faeces and placing a bowl of rice beside a pile of faeces collected from the environs; people can then see the flies moving between the two quite readily. The whole process is summed up by the phrase used in Swahili which translates as “stop eating each other’s shit”. This process is known as “triggering” and results in a community led demand to achieve total sanitation, hence the name. It has reaped dramatic results both around the world and in our programmes in Uganda. We have seen a marked increase in coverage of improved pit latrines thanks to CLTS. See here for more info.

School Sanitation – In all our programme areas we have embraced the idea of promoting sanitation in schools. As well as providing water sources at schools, we also provide latrine blocks for girls and boys. It is important that girls have separate facilities in which to administer to personal hygiene during menstruation free from the stigmatisation of others. Otherwise girls often drop out of school when they hit puberty.