SUSTAINABLE SANITATION

In DRC, SWIFT partners have increased access to improved sanitation through the Villages et Écoles Assainis (Healthy Villages and Schools, or VEA) approach, a step-by-step process of village mobilisation that is supported by DRC’s Ministry of Public Health and by UNICEF. The VEA approach integrates drinking water, sanitation, personal hygiene and solid waste disposal, and its structure is decentralised, community-based and community-driven.

Step 1: A village takes the initiative by making a formal application to the Chief Medical Officer of the Health Zone. If the application is successful, an agreement is signed between village leaders and the local Health Zone office, setting out each party’s commitments.

Step 2: The village forms a managing committee.

Step 3: The community conducts a ‘Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice (KAP)’ analysis of its water, sanitation and hygiene situation.

Step 4: The zonal health team works with a SWIFT partner to help the village’s managing committee develop an action plan. The support provided may include: training of community motivators in hygiene awareness; assistance with conducting the KAP survey; provision of supplies needed to construct household latrines that are unavailable locally; and training and salaries for qualified masons if they are needed for construction work.

Step 5: The action plan must ensure that the village’s facilities, hygiene practices and disease prevention strategies match a set of seven VEA standards:

• There should be a dynamic managing committee
• At least 80% of the village population should have access to clean drinking water
• At least 80% of households should use a hygienic toilet
• At least 80% of households should safely dispose of their rubbish
• At least 60% of the population should wash their hands with soap or alternative cleanser before eating and after using the toilet
• At least 70% of households should understand routes of faecal-oral transmission of disease and how to avoid infection
• At least once a month, the village is cleaned and grass verges cut.

Step 6: The village has between six months and a year to upgrade its toilets, dig its rubbish pits, conduct sufficient hygiene promotion sessions to instill the habit of hand-washing, and organise protection of its water points.

Step 7: When the village has completed its action plan, the zonal health team carries out a post-programme KAP survey.

Step 8: VEA certification is conferred by the Chief Medical Officer of the health zone at a special celebration.

SWIFT is also developing a new approach which is both inclusive and community-driven for the specific requirements of semi-urban contexts. The process has involved technical support from an additional WASH engineer and local development organisation ADIR (Action pour le Développement des Infrastructures en milieu Rural, or Action for Community Development in Rural Areas), as well as the involvement of government bodies and community groups to ensure the approach is sustainable. SWIFT is constantly refining the new system in light of its experiences in semi-urban settings.

SWIFT aims to ensure the sustainability of its sanitation activities in DRC by working through the VEA process and a new approach for semi-urban contexts in close collaboration with local government and other actors (see ‘Increasing access to safe sanitation in DRC’, above). This not only ensures that sanitation activities are embedded within broader government-led strategies for service provision, but means that community-based structures are put in place that provide a strong platform for institutional sustainability.

A key step in the VEA process is the signing of an agreement between the implementing partners, local community leaders, and local government representatives, usually the Chief Medical Officer of the Health Zone.

At community level, the recruitment of Water User Committees is another method by which SWIFT is ensuring sustainability; the committees are trained in the hygienic use and basic technical maintenance of the different types of household latrines, as well as proper management of spares and consumables. Local supply chains are stimulated through the standardised VEA process, helping to ensure that components to repair systems as well as artisans are available locally. 

In semi-urban contexts, SWIFT is working closely with local authorities to ensure the sustainability of its approach.

SWIFT has increased access to safe sanitation in Kenya in a number of ways.

Community-Led Total Sanitation

In the Arid and Semi-Arid (ASAL) region in the north, SWIFT partners Oxfam, Concern and Practical Action have implemented Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), a process of mobilising communities to completely eliminate open defecation.

The CLTS approach focuses on triggering a community’s desire for collective change, and providing support for it to build its own latrines.  The ‘triggering’ is done by stimulating a sense of disgust and shame among community members as they confront the facts about open defecation, and an awareness that as long as even a minority continues to defecate in the open, everyone is at risk of disease.

Communities that have been ‘triggered’ are then ‘followed up’ and supported to dig pits and construct household latrines. Support from the SWIFT programme has included engaging masons to make slabs for the latrines, and training sanitation promoters and villagers so that they can make the slabs in future (see ‘Sustainable sanitation in Kenya’, below).

Fresh Life Toilets and Operators

Millions of residents of Kenya’s informal settlements do not have access to safe sanitation, and are forced to rely on options such as ‘flying toilets’ (defecating into plastic bags, which are then tossed onto the streets) and pit latrines, which release untreated human waste into the environment.

SWIFT partner Sanergy is working to install Fresh Life Toilets in the informal settlement of Mukuru. These pre-fabricated toilets are made of high-quality materials that are easy to keep clean and maintain; have a small footprint that enables them to be installed close to homes, even in cramped and overcrowded streets; and include essential features such as hand-washing facilities.

Local residents purchase the toilets and are trained as Fresh Life Operators, keeping the facilities clean, generating local demand and collecting a small fee from users. Sanergy collects the waste from the toilets on a daily basis, replacing the filled cartridges with clean, empty ones (see ‘Sustainable sanitation in Kenya’, below).

Sanergy has also installed Fresh Life Toilets in schools in Mukuru, and provided WASH training for teachers and ‘edutainment’ days for pupils in collaboration with WASH United (see ‘Hygiene behaviour change in Kenya‘).

SWIFT’s approaches to sanitation in Kenya are designed to be sustainable in different ways.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) aims to ensure sustainability by focusing on behaviour, and triggering the desire for collective change by raising awareness that as long as even a minority continues to defecate in the open, everyone is at risk of disease. The aim is that this will propel people into action and encourage innovation, mutual support and appropriate local solutions, thus leading to greater ownership and sustainability.

To ensure the long-term viability of the household latrines constructed, community members have been trained in making slabs. In Turkana, training has been in constructing concrete dome slabs, a new technology for the area. Making the slabs out of concrete increases sustainability because it is an affordable solution that will reduce the need for timber, which is in short supply and environmentally damaging to use, as well as being prone to termite attack.

Sanergy’s approach to sanitation has sustainability built in, because the Fresh Life Operators who run the toilets must keep them clean and maintain them if they are to continue to collect fees from users. Sanergy offers direct feedback to the operators, and conducts daily check-ups on the functionality of the toilets as an integral part of its daily waste collection visits.

In addition, the waste from the toilets that is collected by Sanergy is converted into useful by-products such as organic fertiliser and renewable energy, for which there is high demand in East Africa.