Community-led sanitation in Nigeria

Bangladeshi experiences are used to inspire communities in Nigeria to build latrines.

Credit: WaterAid / Jim Holmes

What is the connection between a group of villages in Bangladesh and Nigeria? The answer: communities pulling together to build latrines and make their environment clean and healthy.

WaterAid project staff and partners from both countries are building on the successful experiences from Bangladesh to inspire Nigerian villagers to make the same sustainable and vital changes to their hygiene practices.

In poor, remote rural villages such as those in Benue State in Nigeria, people often defecate in the grassy areas surrounding their village. This leaves feces lying around which can be trod in by people, animals or flies and transported back into homes and communal areas, finding its way into food, being washed into water sources and spreading disease through the 'faecal-oral route'.

This kind of environment, combined with a lack of awareness of hygienic practices such as hand washing, quickly leads to illness. Even where development organizations have intervened to subsidize latrine building or provide hygiene education, when the money and support dried up people were not able or motivated to continue improvements, returning instead to open defecation.

In Bangladesh, WaterAid's partner organization VERC has been facilitating community-led total sanitation (CLTS) since 1999. The approach involves inspiring and empowering local communities to stop open defecation. But, what is it about this approach that makes it more successful in making sustained improvements in sanitation? The answer lies in the community's empowerment.

When WaterAid and its partners piloted CLTS in villages in Benue State there was an overall willingness to change from open defecation to adopt latrine construction or at the very least 'dig-and-bury' when going to the toilet outdoors. Community members and project staff build a relationship by talking openly and frankly about 'poo' and toilets, discuss what kind of sanitation the village already has, and go on walks around the area to calculate how much poo is lying around. One of the main ideas is to engender in communities a sense of disgust that these practices mean they are actually ingesting one another's feces.

The result is that communities are motivated to build and use their own latrines. Sustainability needs to be at the heart of improvements, and the fact that people initiate and fund their own solutions means that they are not reliant on external support. After a period of evaluation WaterAid is hoping that CLTS can be replicated in other states; spreading community empowerment and the sustainability that it brings.