Capacity-building village sanitation committees accelerates and sustains communities open defecation free status

Since 2016, Amref Health Africa has been implementing the Kenya Sanitation and Hygiene Improvement Programme (K-SHIP) funded by Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) through the Global Sanitation Fund (GSF). The K-SHIP1 has formed and trained 6480 village sanitation committees (VSCs) on community-led total sanitation (CLTS). However, early to mid-2016, there was slow pace delivering villages ODF because VSCs` capacity-building was not emphasized and streamlined. To accelerate the pace, the programme innovatively resorted to capacity-build VSCs which enabled the K-SHIP to achieve more ODF villages (149 in 2016 and 410 in 2017). This is after ensuring key competencies are acquired by VSCs through a 2-day training and on-job-orientation on CLTS incorporating Sanitation Marketing and Equity & Inclusion during follow-ups. This paper aims to emphasise that to improve CLTS efficiency, sustainability and hence health outcomes and building up strong socio-economic-ODF-slippage-free communities, proper capacity building to VSCs is necessary.