Scaling up rural sanitation in Vietnam: a collective analysis and recommended actions

During last two decades, Vietnam has made tremendous progress in increasing access to improved sanitation in rural areas. The remaining rural sanitation coverage poses challenge to outreach inaccessible and poorest communities with limited resource. Deployment of community mobilization approaches by the provincial line departments has raised hope to scale up sanitation. This demands a series of policy, planning, financial and capacity development measures as identified by relevant ministries and provincial line departments, through a collective analysis of the subsector using a bottleneck analysis tool specifically developed for water, sanitation and hygiene. The participatory process facilitated a collective learning and helped defining a course of actions to eliminate identified bottlenecks. These activities are now being internalised by the line ministry in the national action plan.