Implementing CLTS in areas with a history of subsidised sanitation programmes

Before CLTS was introduced in Nigeria, several approaches have been used to facilitate access to sanitation, many of them subsidy-based or characterised by solutions from outside the community. This has yielded few successful outcomes. The exposure to subsidy programmes left many communities vulnerable, with very little or no access to sanitation. The implementation of CLTS in those communities has proven very challenging. This is because these communities have become dependent on and expectant of external resources for household sanitation, though they seldom make use of these handouts. Therefore, CLTS practitioners tend only to target communities without or not bordering on another community with history of subsidy. The paper sets out how the understanding of past sanitation programmes in a community can be used effectively to guide the implementation of CLTS in communities that have experienced subsidy-based sanitation programmes to attain the ODF status.