Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a transformative approach aimed at eliminating open defecation and improving sanitation practices through community engagement and empowerment. This method emphasises collective behaviour change rather than merely providing sanitation infrastructure, enabling communities to identify and address their own sanitation challenges using local resources and knowledge.
Organizations like BRAC and later UNICEF integrated CLTS into their sanitation strategies, ensuring that communities not only achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status but also sustain improvements over time. CLTS' results are duly documented by A4A/IRC, PLAN and the approach is elaborated in the video in Tanzania. 'Mr. Toilet', Jack Sim is a well-known promotor.
CLTS does not come with any recommendation for a toilet technology to be applied. However, the SaTo pan might come in handy. It was developed in 2012, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy, and International Development Enterprises (iDE) and American Standard (AS). It is a a potential solution to the hygiene problems stemming from the lack of proper toilet facilities. The SaTo pan — deriving its name from “Safe Toilet” — is an attempt to limit the transmission of disease by ensuring that the toilets being used are closed off from the open air, thus preventing insects or other vectors from communicating those diseases. The basic design is a plastic pan that fits into a concrete base over a pit. See instructions. Evaluations in the field praise this solution.
