Open Defecation Free Communities: East Java

Factors Associated with Achieving and Sustaining Open Defecation Free Communities: Learning from East Java

The Water and Sanitation Program’s (WSP) Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation Project, a learning-by-doing initiative implemented in partnership with local and national governments in Indonesia, India, and Tanzania, sought answers by working at scale from the beginning and by testing a combination of two relatively new and promising approaches: Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and sanitation marketing.

What does it take to bring about sustainable sanitation behavior change, cost-effectively, and at scale? The search for answers has intensified in the rural sanitation sector in Indonesia, where access to improved sanitation has grown much too slowly from 22 per- cent in 1990 to just 36 percent in 2008, and the Millennium Development Goal target for rural sanitation seems well beyond reach. Meanwhile economic losses from poor sanitation and hygiene are costing Indonesia US$6.3 billion or 2.3 percent of its GDP per year.

The Water and Sanitation Program’s (WSP) Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation Project, a learning-by-doing initiative implemented in partner- ship with local and national governments in Indonesia, India, and Tan- zania, sought answers by working at scale from the beginning and by testing a combination of two relatively new and promising approaches: Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and sanitation marketing.

The subsidy-free CLTS4 approach is one that Indonesia field-trialed in 2005 with such positive results that by mid-2006, the Ministry of Health had changed ongoing national water and sanitation project strategies mid-stream, making CLTS the principal vehicle for scaling up rural sanitation in Indonesia. Simultaneously, in Bangladesh, Vietnam and some African countries, subsidy-free, market-based sanitation programs were showing encouraging results in scaling up access to sanitation in poor rural populations. In Indonesia, sanitation marketing was seen as complementary to CLTS, and two projects combining CLTS with sanitation marketing emerged: the World Bank-supported Third Water and Sanitation for Low-Income Communities Project (PAMSIMAS) in 2006 and WSP’s Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation Project, which was launched in the East Java province of Indonesia in January 2007.

Key Findings

• QUICKLY Open Defecation Free (ODF) communities rep- resent the most efficient model for scaling up sustainably.
• ODF outcomes that materialize late, after many months of triggering, should be subject to intensive verification and periodic rechecks.
• Sanitation behavior change is difficult to ignite in river- bank and waterfront communities and special strategies are needed.
• Poor quality Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) triggering is invariably associated with lack of ODF achievement, but good quality CLTS triggering alone does not guarantee ODF outcomes.
• Provided CLTS triggering is of sufficient quality, ODF achievement and sustainability are hastened by:
• a) community’s social capital and the involvement of leadership in the change process, b) local availability and affordability of latrine attributes desired by poor and non-poor consumers, c) absence of externally provided subsidies to a few households, and d) post-triggering monitoring and follow-up by external agencies together with communities.