Ethiopian communities take the lead in ending open defecation

Children shout out "No to open defecation!" during CLTS training

3 September 2007: A community-led approach to ending open defecation in Shebedino Wereda, Ethiopia, has seen sanitation figures soar.

Open defecation is a major contributory factor to the high incidence of diarrhoea in the country, which causes 46% of childhood deaths.

Plan has been helping by organising training for villages on Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).

CLTS mobilises communities to identify their problems and work out their own solutions to improving sanitation and hygiene behaviour.

Since CLTS was introduced in February 2007, it has been rolled out to 57 villages and seen more than 1,400 households construct pit latrines on their own initiative.

Confronting offenders

Fura Kebele village has adopted a simple message: no defecation in the open – not ever!

Anyone caught defecating soon wishes they had obeyed the community’s new rule: they are forced to carry their own excrement to the nearest latrine.

Weizero Belayinesh Worku is one of the community leaders who is helping to make her village defecation free by confronting offenders in the act.

“After the CLTS approach was introduced, each household in our village dug a latrine of its own. For passers-by, we constructed 7 communal latrines along the main road to the market place.

“After all these efforts, I found 4 men at different times defecating in open fields in our village. I ordered them to shovel it with their hands and take it into the nearby toilet. As I caught them with their trousers down, they didn’t resist; they only begged me to allow them to handle their excrement with leaves. I allowed them and they shovelled it with leaves into the toilet,” she said.

Making a difference

Health extension worker, Assefash Kifle, is in no doubt of the importance of the changes. “In our village, open defecation is becoming history,” she said.

Find out more about Plan’s water and sanitation work in Ethiopia

Download the Plan Ethiopia report: Triggering community self help and self action toward sanitation: The training on Community-led Total Sanitation approach in Ethiopia (word, 1.4Mb)