THE United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) include a target to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

In December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2008 “The International Year of Sanitation”, in recognition of the slow progress being made towards MDGs' sanitation target.

The year aims to develop awareness and action to meet the target. Its particular concerns are

(i) Removing the stigma around sanitation, so that the importance of sanitation can be easily and publicly discussed.

(ii) Highlighting poverty reduction, health and other benefits that flow from better hygiene, household sanitation arrangements and wastewater treatment.

The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) coordinated a research programme on Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) which has a radically different approach to rural sanitation in developing countries and has shown promising success where traditional rural sanitation programmes have failed.

CLTS is an unsubsidised approach to rural sanitation that facilitates communities to recognise the problem of open defecation and take collective action to clean up and become 'open defecation free'.

It uses community-led methods such as participatory mapping and analysing pathways between faeces and mouth as a means of galvanising communities into action.

In Pakistan, the CLTS approach is implemented by Integrated Rural Support Programme (IRSP) in 2004 in District Mardan with the close collaboration of TMA Takht Bhai to facilitate communities for achieving total sanitation targets.

From 2004 till 2009, the IRSP has declared 100 villages as openly defection free, and rewards were given to them by TMA Takht Bhai in appreciation.

On the other hand, it is building the capacities of different government departments, CSOs, village organisations, teachers, LHWs, etc., on CLTS to trigger it in their respective areas around the country.

IRSP believes that for achieving total sanitation targets before 2015, the Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach needs initiation, attention, adoption and replication in each corner of the country to minimise diarrhoea, cholera, malaria, scabies and typhoid and declare the whole country as fully sanitised.

The media can play its due role in mobilising, educating and informing different segments of the community, regarding achieving total sanitation targets.

ISMAIL HASHMI
Via email