I want to push on an assumption that shapes a lot of how CLTS programmes are designed, reported, and funded: that an ODF certificate is the finish line , the moment community-led sanitation has "worked."
Our experience embedding Sanitation Safety Planning into post-ODF in, Northern Uganda, has made me increasingly uneasy with that assumption.
Here's the pattern we keep seeing: a village triggers, builds latrines, gets verified, gets certified. Everyone - implementing partner, district, sometimes the community itself, treats that certification as the outcome. Attention and resources move to the next village. But nobody is systematically asking what those latrines look like a year later. Are they still standing? Still safe to use? Still being used at all, or has open defecation quietly crept back in as pits fill and superstructures weaken?
When we started layering safety and sustainability indicators onto the existing post-ODF verification tools , we weren't inventing a new problem. We were just finally measuring one that CLTS's own success metric had trained everyone not to look at.
The assumption I want to challenge
CLTS is genuinely powerful as a triggering mechanism ; it's one of the few approaches that gets communities to collectively decide open defecation is unacceptable, using their own analysis rather than an outsider's. But somewhere along the way, a lot of us (myself included, for years) let "ODF" collapse two very different things into one certificate: behaviour change and infrastructure durability. The first can be real and lasting even while the second quietly fails.
If that's true, then ODF rates, the number most programmes are still judged on may be telling us much more about triggering success than about actual sanitation outcomes a year or two down the line.
Questions 
    • Is anyone else finding that their post-ODF slippage is more of an infrastructure/safety problem than a behavioural one  or is it usually the reverse in your context? 
    • For those who've tried to keep monitoring "community-led" after certification (rather than handing it to an external audit team), what's actually kept village health teams or sanitation committees engaged once the initial triggering energy has faded? 
    • Should ODF certification itself be redefined to include a durability/safety component, or does that risk overloading a tool that's already doing a lot of work just to get communities to that first behaviour shift?