WG 7 Working group on communities, rural and schools (including gender and social aspects)

Dear WG7 members,

I would like to open the field for prosposals on what the working groups should be doing and working on in future. After the great achievements of jointly working and publishing the factsheets of "Sustainable Sanitation in schools" and "Integrating a gender perspective in sustainable sanitation" there is the opportunity to venture into new topics and ideas.

Please use this forum to propose your ideas of what to do and also on how to work together. The working group is a loose network of professionals that can decide to prepare own documents, provide a sounding board for relevant issues, coordinate actions and projects as well as take the lead in advocacy and other issues that foster sustainable sanitation.

One of my personal ideas circles around a better knowledge management of community, rural and school sanitation on the SuSanA working group page. I observe it as a general problem to not easily find the most relevant publications, projects and lessons learnt. Since all of us have knowledge of a certain fraction of information and experience it would be logical to feed it into the SuSanA working group page. Making it to a knowledge hub of practical value for your everday work. The webpage can be easily adjusted to what works best for us. I hope to hear some thought about that.

I hope to hear from you. Once there are sufficient responses I or the working group lead will forward a summary of your proposals to the group.

Best regards,
Christian Rieck

Hi Christian
This is actually very valuable updates from the two CoP . Some of the issues raised in the CoP coincide with our indentified topics for further insight.
I still think if we have someone with time the institutional aspects are certainly very valuable and especially when we talk about introducing more sustainable aspects of sanitation..

Dear Chris,
Thank you for this start up.
The change of political baton in lagos/nigeria has brought new ideas on toilet facilities provision in public Schools. The recent unfortunate incident of the death af a primary school pupils in a dilapidated pit latrine in the school premises has further catalysed government action in revisiting and paying more attention to school sanitation.
The public sanitation unit of the ministry of the Environment under Government directive has completed the status report on the state of sanitation in schools where toilet facilities has been provided in the past.
I will be willing to share information on progress as decisions are taken,implementions and how sanitation is scaled up.
Waheed Afolabi Bakare

Dear Chris,
Your observations are valid. We need to start making meaning contributions to what we are doing in our communities to this forum. I hope to get back into this forum with the latest works we have done regarding school sanitation here in Zambia.

Regards,
Westone (Water & Sanitation Engineer)

Dear all,

@Madeleine: Can you please specify the identified topics for furter insight?

What I can see from the intial replies is that school sanitation is still a pressing issue. Maybe it could be a good idea to collect actual successful examples of school sanitation with regard to the guiding principles for sustainable sanitation in schools that we identified in our factsheet. (see the WG 7 factsheet www.susana.org/docs_ccbk/susana_download...sion-5-july-2011.pdf). Must all principles actually be fulfilled to have well working school sanitation facilities? What is context specific?

Just to remind you of these principles:

- The school ensures the training of all pupils before and after the toilets are constructed. Training for pupils must be carried out every year again when new pupils come to school
- The same type of toilet should be installed for the teachers.
- The pupils can even be involved in building their own toilets.
- All teachers and staff members participate in the trainings. Information on operation and maintenance of the toilet facility is available for school staff and caretakers.
- The school employs paid cleaning staff who cleans the toilet several times a day, ideally after each break.
- In the case of UDDTs: The toilet products are ideally reused as fertiliser by the school or a nearby farmer.
- The school or community takes the responsibility for maintenance and repair of the facility.
- The school administration is ready and able to provide the hand washing facilities, water, soap, towels, toilet paper etc.
- All legal aspects must be considered and discussed with the local authorities in advance if a technology with reuse is implemented.

Also school led total sanitation and skill-based education should be validated through actual examples. What do you think? There are of course a number of case studies but they not all so successful and not all reflect the principles, see here susana.org/lang-en/case-studies?showby=d...vbl_5=22&vbl_0=0

Best regards,
Christian

Dear WG 7 members,
(for those who don't know, WG 7 stands for working group on "schools, rural, community sanitation with gender and social aspects")

My suggestion is that members of WG 7 could link more closely with the WASH in schools partnership which UNICEF is spear heading. They are using the new abbreviation WinS for "WASH in schools". SuSanA partners are ideally suited to fill the S in WASH with life and content! All too often, the S in WASH just means pit latrines and nothing else (and it gets less emphasis than the WA and the H)... (WASH = water, sanitation, hygiene).

I recently took part in one of their monthly WebEx online meetings, which are hosted by UNICEF New York. It was my first session with using WebEx and I really liked it. You need good internet access though. But you don't need to pay for using it, only the host needs to pay. The host gives the microphone to different presenters, and the slides of the presenters are visible on the left side. If you want to ask a question or make a comment, you can raise your hand (click a button) and the host can give you the microphone. This ensures that only one person speaks at a time even if 20+ people are in the same online session.

What I also like is that the sessions are recorded. With this link you can re-play the 1-hour session. You will see and hear several presentations. In this particular meeting, there was not so much directly on sanitation (I felt). You can hear me speak at time 39:16 which is when I gave an introduction about this discussion forum. I wanted to encourage the people in the WinS group to make use of this discussion forum.

Link of the recorded session:
unicef.webex.com/unicef/ldr.php?AT=pb&am...Key=49de2dfa2811c510

If you want to join the next session (they are on every last Wednesday of the month), please get in touch with Tatiana Bejar from UNICEF, I copy her details below.

Tatiana has also reminded me of a call for case study, which I also attach. I have replied to her that we have a number of SuSAnA case studies on schools, but these are longer than the format they asked for.

E-mail from Tatiana:
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Regards,
Elisabeth

Hi Madeleine,

the topic you mentioned was indeed the one that came out of the last SuSanA working group meeting in Stockholm 2011.
Especially in rural and suburban areas worldwide there are so many projects with productive and sustainable sanitation running which are quite successful (at least until the project duration ends). We know quite well the technologies and how to adapt to local conditions but why do good projects then hardly replicate further and are often not up-scaled? I know that this question has been posed before and there are no quick answers, are there?. It would be interesting to find out and summarise enabling factors for up-scaling.

A summary of enabling factors may lead then to the next step which SuSanA members can take, to approach policy makers with more concrete policy reommendations based on good evidence.

Looking forward to your comments and ideas
Claudia Wendland - WECF
www.sanitation.wecf.eu/

Hi all
A Quick one: I am concerned at the ready translation of sanitation into technologies and handwashing as discreet approaches whereas we all know that sanitation is cleanliness surrounding the natural and daily event of defeacation. Toilets are one part of safe disposal and clean hands another but functional and clean depends on many other intermingled behaviours that dominate effective sanitation. It may be better to go bush and dig a hole than collect faeces in one place for the purpose of fly party invitations.
I suggest that CLTS be applied in the mix of approaching schools as kids are great facilitators with less restraint and more direct associations than educated professional adults seem able to hold in the concept of sanitation.
Link into conversations about CLTS and lets find out what experience may tell from around the world.

Thanks for the care and work and thinking done in this space of a central community institution that serves the most important "clients" - the kids - of sanitation wisdoms. Without school sanitation individual households can forget about benefits of convenience at home.
Looking forward to further converstaion - I have yet to explore more in this sub site so forgive me If I have jumped in unawares.
Deborah Cousins
South Africa