Sustaining sanitation beyond projects : developing enabling environments for sustaining and scaling up sanitation improvements

Previous experiences using infrastructure oriented approaches in sanitation interventions led to poor progress on outputs and outcomes. Building on this experience, many countries have recently adopted a behavior change approach to improving sanitation. The primary focus of this approach is changing the behaviors of individuals, households and communities, rather than promoting toilets. Raising community awareness about the need for better sanitation leads to increased demand and acceptance. This approach is more likely to be sustainable. In India, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) launched in 1999, signalled a paradigm shift with the adoption of a behavior change approach - one that emphasized a community led approach to total sanitation. Similar Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) initiatives have been initiated in other countries. Increasing the demand for sanitation improvements would generate little sustainable change if the supply of sanitation products and services did not develop simultaneously. Access to a range of affordable product options at convenient locations at the right time - when demand is generated - is essential to the process of achieving a Total Sanitation community. Facilitating the development of a market to supply products, through private entrepreneurship (to ensure sustainability) is a key component of this approach.