Community Led Total Sanitation in the Afram Plains

Credit: WaterAid

By Emmanuel Addai

In recent years, latrine provision in rural communities in Ghana has been carried out using subsidies. But now, a new approach, Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), innovated in Asia, has come to West Africa.

CLTS is community mobilisation and hygiene education approach that involves virtually no subsidy to users. WaterAid has piloted the approach in Nigeria and is promoting it in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali.

APDO, a WaterAid Ghana partner, has taken the CLTS concept seriously and is piloting the approach in four communities in the Afram Plains. By emphasising sanitation promotion; hygiene education; and community mobilisation and action, these four communities have shown tremendous improvement in behavioral change by eradicating open defecation.

Child-friendly latrines have also been developed and needy members of the communities have been supported to have their own latrines or to get access to other people's.