That's interesting, thanks for this clarification, Petra.
How would you explain why CLTS is not as successful in Latin American countries, or not successful in Bolivia, to take a specific case?
Is it perhaps because these countries are already "further along" than some of the Asian and African countries? I.e. there is less prevalence of open defecation and perhaps CLTS works best in settings where open defecation is really high? Or less "community pressures", more "individual behaviors" perhaps?

Yes... most of those listings are based on Knowledge Hub information, ie things copied from our website and publications - in a strict sense CLTS is in Latin Ameria in one country.But it would be misleading to equate it with the level to which CLTS has been taken up in Asia and Africa.

MWA-LAP is working on a project in La Guajira in Colombia which includes CLTS: rsr.akvo.org/project/789/

Also Kamal Kar has repeatedly said that CLTS is in Latin America (including in peer reviewed papers) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's CLTS research team state "Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is an approach to sanitation promotion that has spread to countries across South Asia, Latin America and Africa over the past 15 years."

Just a quick reply from me re the Latin America question. CLTS has only been introduced in one country in Latin America- Bolivia. And there have been major challenges there. So I don't think we can claim it is being used in Latin America. The main areas of implementation and learning have been in Asia and Africa as Jamie correctly wrote.

And about the history section for the CLTS article: Oliver Jones above had posted about the early work of an NGO in Bangladesh.

I went to their website and found this information:

www.verc.org/clts.html

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)

Village Education Resource Center (VERC) as the pioneering NGO innovated CLTS approach in February 2000. Working at grass root level with community on WATSAN program VERC has learned that community awareness and increased initiative and active participation could prevent most of the water and excreta borne diseases. As such VERC has been executing “People Initiated 100% Sanitation Approach” since early 2000 with financial and technical assistance of WaterAid Bangladesh supported by DFID. The approach is now referred to as the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach in Bangladesh and abroad. VERC experience was also reflected in national sanitation program strategy.

I am wondering if this should be mentioned in the Wikipedia article, provided we have a reference to cite? Just citing their website would not be ideal.

Or perhaps many organisations are claiming to have been "pioneers of CLTS"? Does anyone have any insights in the work that VERC did in Bangladesh starting in the year 2000?

Dear Jamie,

Thanks so much for working on the CLTs article on Wikipedia. That's excellent. We started discussing this via e-mail but I suggested to put it on the forum in case others are also interested in improving the CLTS article further (and I hope they are).

I had a quick look at the proposed changes to the CLTS article on Wikipedia in your attached Word document. Like Joe, I also think it looks good overall. However, I have the same points to make as Joe:

Why did you remove Latin America in this sentence?

It has spread throughout Bangladesh and to many other Asican, and African and Latin American countries with support from the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank, DFID and other bilateral donors, Plan International, WaterAid, CARE, UNICEF, SNV and other large INGOs and many national NGOs

.

Is CLTS not so successful in Latin America? If not, do we have a reference that says something about that point?

This is a strong sentence but it needs a reference (as Joe pointed out):

In at least 20 countries CLTS is part of national policy.

Perhaps we should even list these 20 countries, or at least the top 10 countries where CLTS has been most successful.

By the way if you know there should be a citation but you don't have one at hand yet, you can also add this into the source code: {{citation needed}}. That's a hint to another editor that they should find a reference...

You have moved the history section from the back to the front of the article. However, we had moved it back to be consistent with other sanitation articles, based on the Manual of Style that we have developed for sanitation articles ( see here ). This manual of style is modelled on the Manual of Style for the Wikiproject Medicine, which also puts the history section last. I think when people look for encyclopedic content they first want to know the current situation and perhaps only later the historical aspects.

A statement such as this will need a reference (I know that you know this, but I am just putting this here so that other people who are interested in editing on Wikipedia are aware of this):

It has been estimated that 30 million people have benefitted from CLTS

Should this sentence really be deleted even though it had a reference with it? Maybe it just needs to be clarified? :

Some researchers suggest that this means support is needed to support communities to upgrade facilities in ODF villages which have been triggered by CLTS

I am not sure if I agree with your new heading of "Combining with Ecosan". Firstly, not everyone will know what ecosan means so you'd have to define that. Remember we are writing for lay people here. "Reuse of excreta" which is how it was called before is clearer, I think. Secondly, you are then proceeding to equating ecosan to UDDTs and composting toilets which is not correct (see Wikipedia entry on ecosan: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_sanitation)

So I don't think we need to bring up the term "ecosan" here at all, but should keep to the topics that we want to discuss. I.e. how CLTS can be coupled with reuse of excreta and how villagers know or don't know about UDDTs as a possible alternative option to pit latrines.

As you told me that in your MSc thesis you looked at CLTS and UDDTs together, this might be a good document to cite?
www.lumes.lu.se/database/alumni/11.13/Th...rs_Jamie_2013019.pdf

Ecological Sanitation: A sustainable dream or reality?
Exploring complexity of transitions to more sustainable
sanitation practices: A case-study of Burmi Tola, India
Lund University, Sweden
(2013)

I just had a quick look at your thesis, but it doesn't say that much about CLTS though?
And why in your conclusions on page 39 you describe ecosan as a technological fix?
That's exactly what it is not. Were you equating ecosan with building UDDTs?

Ecosan, as a technological fix, has been promoted as a way to solve some of the world’s sanitation
problems. Yet, the data shows that there are many complex barriers to implementing and scaling-up
new technologies.

I have recently done some additional work on the Wikipedia page of ecosan (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_sanitation) and on the Wikipedia page on reuse of excreta (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuse_of_excreta). In the latter, there is a section on policy which draws on a publication by SEI:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuse_of_excreta#Policies

I think your thesis conclusions would probably agree with what is there under policy. But to describe ecosan as a "technological fix" I find somewhat odd. Perhaps you could explain what you meant with it and why you used that wording? Who has proposed ecosan to you as a "technological fix"?

Kind regards,
Elisabeth

Most of that looks reasonable to me, Jamie. I agree that the talk of the TSC was a bit irrelevant as it did not seem to relate to CLTS (but to be clear it was there because of the discussion from the World Bank report)

The minor issues I have are relating to the way you've added unreferenced information and removed some which had references. For example the statement that CLTS is in Latin America is from the website of the CLTS Knowledge Hub.

Also we'd need a reference to show that it was national policy in more than 20 countries, that there was an issue combining CLTS with ecosan and showing the number of people who have benefited from CLTS.

I have attempted to make some changes. I have done this on a word document (see attachments) before starting to make changes to the wikipedia page (which I am hoping to do next week).

Major changes:

- Added a section on the problems of combining CLTS and Ecosan
- Bring the 'history' section higher up the page
- Removing the part about 'lack of effectiveness in a study of similar methods' as this was not CLTS but the Total Sanitation Campaign

Dear Oliver,

Yes, that would be great if you could help us improve the history section for the CLTS Wikipedia article. Please put here in this thread how it should be changed, or change it yourself in the Wikipedia article or drop me an e-mail on how it should be changed.

This is how it reads at present:

History[edit source | edit]

In 1999 and 2000, Kamal Kar was working in a village called Mosmoil in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, and decided that a system of attitudinal changes by villagers might have a longer-lasting effect than the existing top-down approach involving subsidies from NGOs and government.[1] The Bangladeshi government began a programme of installing expensive latrines in the 1970s, but the government decided this was too costly, and many of the original latrines were abandoned.[4] In the 1990s, a social mobilisation plan was begun to encourage people to demand and install better sanitation systems, but early success did not last, according to Kar. At that point Kar, a participatory development expert from India, was brought in by Wateraid and he concluded that the problem with previous approaches was that local people had not "internalised" the demand for sanitation. He suggested a new approach: abandoning subsidies and appealing to the better nature of villagers and their sense of self-disgust to bring about change. The CTLS Foundation is the organisation set up by Kar to promote these ideas. Kar and Robert Chambers stated in their 2008 CLTS Handbook:

It is fundamental that CLTS involves no individual house-hold hardware subsidy and does not prescribe latrine models.

—Kamal Kar, Robert Chambers, CLTS Foundation Handbook, 2008 page 8 [5]
In time, NGOs and governments began to see the value of the approach and ran their own schemes in various countries, some with less aversion to subsidies than Kamal Kar.[3] Community-led Total Sanitation as an idea had grown beyond its founder and was being run in slightly different ways in India, Nepal, Sierra Leone and Zambia.[6]

CLTS as an idea now has many supporters around the world, with Robert Chambers, co-writer of the CLTS Foundation Handbook, describing it this way:

"We have so many "revolutions" in development that only last a year or two and then fade into history. But this one is different. In all the years I have worked in development this is as thrilling and transformative as anything I have been involved in."

—Robert Chambers from Institute of Development Studies, The Guardian, 30 May 2011[7]
Today there are many NGOs and research institutes with an interest in CLTS, including for example the CLTS Knowledge Hub of the Institute of Development Studies, the CLTS Foundation led by Kamal Kar, The World Bank,[8] Wateraid,[9] Plan USA[10], SNV from the Netherlands and UNICEF.[11]

And I am happy to report that I finally got hold of a good CLTS photo under an open licence, provided by SNV Ghana. I have included it in the Wikipedia article:

CLTS triggering process in the Volta Region of Ghana by Sustainable sanitation , on Flickr

More photos are very welcome (they need to be under an open licence CC BY SA, i.e. without restriction of rights). They would be added to the flickr collection of SuSanA and also (some of them) to the Wikipedia article.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Sounds good to me, Oliver.

Great work Joe, having an improved version of the CLTS page is a useful resource for the sector. I have not been through the whole page in detail (but I will) however having worked for the WaterAid South Asia team during the early years of CLTS, I don't believe the history section provides a complete picture of the emergence of CLTS and the actors involved. For example, the Bangladeshi NGO Village Education Resource Centre (VERC) played a central role in the creation and early implementation of CLTS. I think Yakub Hossain and other colleagues from VERC could add some significant value to articulating the early history. If interest, I would be happy to facilitate the involvement of VERC and other actors engaged from the beginning of CLTS in this task to ensure we get as accurate a picture as possible?
Oliver

Dear All,

As I said I am happy to collaborate with a range of people on this. What I was saying was that I think there is a strong case for us to be involved.

‘Reuse of Excreta’ – Elisabeth I pointed to this as it was useful to highlight that in its current form it is weighted towards the use of EcoSan. This is not a criticism of CLTS per se but a potential challenge to those attempting to combine EcoSan with CLTS. I actually wrote a paper as a student on the problems of combining EcoSan with CLTS.

I agree with having a criticism section – that was not something I had objected to in my previous comment. Much of the work that we do is focused on reflecting on the CLTS process.

Looking forward to getting stuck in and working together.

All the best,

Jamie