Getting rid of the goo

Aeysa Sydalbepra stands in front of her family latrine built using local materials.

Credit: WaterAid / Abir Abdullah

As an Oasis reader you may not be too familiar with the word 'goo', but in Bangladesh it is a common phrase used for human waste. Here Tawheed Reza Noor describes the unique goo campaign that is changing the lives of some of Bangladesh's poorest people.

Bangladesh is still struggling for stability since gaining independence in 1971, when three million lost their lives in the liberation war. It is a country beset with problems, losing many people to natural and man-made disasters every year.

If you visit rural Bangladesh, you see a green, fertile land. Yet you will also see rural lives marooned in hardship. Bangladesh has all the characteristics of a developing country - poverty and its associated diseases are common here.

In a traditional Bangladeshi village there are few or no latrines. Open defecation is the norm. These villages bear witness to the fact that only 15% of people in rural areas of Bangladesh have effective sanitation. No less than 11% of all of the deaths in Bangladesh are due to diarrhoeal diseases.

While toilets and human waste aren't common topics of conversation, hygienic sanitation is vitally important to people's health. Without somewhere safe and clean to go to the toilet human waste can contaminate food and water sources, spreading diseases that can kill. As repeated diarrhoea affects the body's ability to absorb food, people's nutrition and long term health are also affected. It is estimated that the treatment of diseases related to poor hygiene costs five billion taka (£30 million) every year. Prevention, not treatment, is urgently needed.

However, while many organisations in Bangladesh have been working hard to alleviate the water and sanitation problems, the long term sustainability of many programmes is questionable as the communities, which are meant to benefit from the schemes, have not been involved in their provision.

Through its experience in project work WaterAid knows that it is very hard to change people's established habits and practices - lasting change won't happen unless people want to change their situation. It has therefore taken a different tack, and by working through its partner organisation, Village Education Resource Centre (VERC), since early 2000, it has proved that local communities can provide their own permanent sanitation solutions.

The key to the project is community involvement - the project is based in the community and led by the community. The project focuses on hygiene education, and when communities understand that the problems in their village relate to water, sanitation and hygiene they instigate changes themselves, without any subsidies at all.

After building rapport with the community, 'goo site visits' take place, where the community walks through the village looking for goo. The community is then asked to map all of the houses in the village, indicating whether or not they have latrines. Next the open defecation sites are marked on the map so that the community can later visualise how ponds and other water sources get contaminated.

To further highlight the extent of the problem the community then calculate the total number of faeces lying around the village. Each community develops their own method of putting a numeric value on how much they are contributing to the problem. Usually this is through simple arithmetic: starting from an initial unit of measurement per person, which they then multiply to calculate the family's faeces 'contribution' per week, month, year, and so on.

They then analyse how open defecation spreads disease. Flow diagrams are drawn to trace how goo spreads to ponds, household utensils, domestic articles and, most importantly, to food through flies, livestock and pets. Shockingly communities find that each of them ingests between 11 and 22 grams of faecal matter every single day.

Unsurprisingly the communities are generally horrified by the resulting figures and this motivates them to change the situation. They then launch into action. Children play an active role in this stage by marking any visible goo with flags. They go around the village chanting slogans against open defecation. Their cries of 'stop open defecation', 'clean the village' and 'hanging latrines are full of germs' ensure everyone rethinks their actions!

Most villages then form a committee which develops an action plan. Each committee member pledges to construct their own household latrine within a week and persuade a further 10-12 neighbouring households to do the same.

In most cases female school teachers and religious leaders have been found to take the lead. The type of latrine people build depends upon their wealth and ability. Those who can afford it buy concrete rings, latrine slabs and pans from outside sources, while others start planning homemade toilets, using locally available materials like bamboo and wood.

The freedom to innovate and experiment enables individuals to choose from a range of latrine options, and, as communities have been encouraged to develop their own ideas many technical, social and economic innovations have taken place - with communities designing local and low-cost latrines that are suitable to their conditions.

Today, there are more than twenty models of toilets innovated by local communities and the cheapest one costs only Taka 15 (16p).

No subsidies have been given but villagers themselves have introduced cross subsidies: land owners have allowed landless people to install low-cost latrines or have helped provide materials.

The engineers from VERC and WaterAid encourage this innovation by providing technical help and support whenever and wherever it is required. And while many latrines are different in design all are free of odour, flies and other insects and hygienically keep faeces out of site.

It is this skilled facilitation that is one of the key components to the community's involvement and motivation for change. Having a relaxed, frank and transparent facilitation style with no hidden agenda is the pre-requisite for success.

The right attitude and a sensitive, articulate nature are very important and this ultimately results in the entire community developing their own action plans for cleaning their village.

Scaling up and spreading the success of community participation projects remains difficult to achieve.

Yet in the case of sanitation, where open defecation is a centuries-old practice and a very serious health problem, participatory projects are found to create a realisation in the communities, triggering sustained and self-spreading community action.

WaterAid is now working hard to mainstream this type of approach within the government systems and promote it to others working on sanitation.

 Over time it is increasing in popularity and it looks like the goo campaign could make a big difference to Bangladesh's poor.

Tawheed Reza Noor is the Programme Coordinator - Research, Learning and Documentation Team for WaterAid in Bangladesh.