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Further details on CLTS in China
Challenges:
•
Toilets in households – a different kind of mind-set:
In the villages of Puchang County in Shaanxi province, most families
have small brick walled enclosures without roof or door attached
to
their dwellings. Here, people defecate on the ground, sometimes
using a squatting plate or a squatting stand made of two bricks.
The human excreta generally remain accumulated there for days and
weeks. Except in winter, when everything is frozen solid, these
toilets emit a terrible stench and are infested with flies.
• Faeces used as manure: Human excreta are
systematically used as manure for fertilising crops and vegetables.
In many houses, the excreta of all family members are collected
in buckets over the course of five to seven days, and then taken
to the field and applied raw in the crops. As the practice is an
age old tradition and of enormous economic value in terms of agricultural
production, it presents a major challenge for introduction and sustainability
of CLTS. Appropriate toilet models, allowing access to and use of
faeces yet breaking the faecal-oral contamination cycle, need to
be developed in consultation with communities. Plan China has developed
an eco-san toilet model that
separates urine and faeces. The latter can then be collected separately
for use as manure. In addition, nearly 70 per cent of the smell
can be reduced if urine and stool are separated.
• School sanitation: Rural schools have separate
toilet blocks for boys and girls, with a row of squatting plates
used for both defecation and urination. In
addition to the problems of smell and fly infestation due to accumulation
of faeces and urine in a ditch behind the walls of the toilet buildings,
hygiene is another problem that urgently needs addressing. Toilet
paper is used for anal cleaning, but hand washing after defecation
is almost non-existent. Generally, there are no water taps or water
containers nearby. If water is available outside, it quickly freezes.
Ensuring alternative hand washing facilities in schools months is
therefore a challenge, particularly during winter. At the same time,
there is great potential for scaling up CLTS through introducing
it in schools and spreading it to the villages through schoolchildren.
• Technology: In contrast to tropical countries
or southern China, in Shaanxi province in central China latrine
technology presents a challenge as temperatures often drop below
zero. Frozen soil
makes it impossible to dig latrine pits. Extremely cold winds also
make people reluctant to walk a distance for open defecation away
from their houses. Moreover, plastic pans and pipes of different
quality and standard are needed to prevent cracking and bursting
in these extreme cold temperature regimes.
• Five Year Plan: Government officers and
Plan field staff are finding it difficult to promote CLTS without
subsidy. The main reason for this, according to Plan China, is that
in the Five Year Plan for 2006–2010, the Chinese Government
has decided to increase rural investment, almost doubling the amount
from the last Five Year Plan. A major part of the investment will
be used for infrastructure as well as providing subsidy to farmers
for fertilisers and seeds to improve the productivity and their
livelihood. Rural sanitation is still not on the government’s
main agenda. However, it is believed that stopping the subsidy for
sanitation would lead to the community losing interest in building
latrines as they are getting subsidy for agriculture.
Successes
• The first CLTS training workshop in Puchang in December
2005 introduced the approach to a number of interested national
and international institutions in China.
• Senior officials of Plan China, including the Programme
Support Manager and other sanitation specialists, seemed convinced
by the approach and have decided to pilot it in non-Plan villages.
• The Programme Support Manager met with the officers of China
State Council Poverty Alleviation, who showed interest in collaborating
with Plan China on the natural resource management in BaiShui County
of ShaanXi Province. This could be a good opportunity to trigger
CLTS in non-Plan areas.
Lessons learned/recommendations
• There is great potential for CLTS in China, provided it
is facilitated with the right attitude, behaviour and spirit. If
it is possible to avoid the up-front, hardware subsidy for toilet
construction at the individual household level, it would be possible
to trigger and spread CLTS in the rural areas quite fast, similar
to other countries in south and south east Asia. As in India and
other countries in south Asia, rural people still feel that sanitation
is something which the government should provide and thus often
expect an external subsidy.
• A flexible approach may need to be adopted to initiate CLTS
in some areas where subsidy on sanitation hardware cannot be avoided.
The individual H/H hardware subsidy could be changed to a ‘collective
community reward’. As soon as a community stops open defecation
totally through local action, the amount of subsidy originally allocated
for the village could be given to the community to spend on community
causes like water, roads, school repair etc. This approach reduces
external dependence, encourages communities to initiate local action,
builds community confidence and triggers other local actions in
the wake of CLTS.
• The notion that the construction of sanitary toilets costs
a lot of money and that they are therefore not affordable for the
poor living in villages needs to be eradicated. Raising awareness
and
demonstrating construction of low cost simple toilets of different
types is essential.
• It is important that an agency interested and capable of
piloting CLTS in China steps forward as soon as possible, in order
to pursue the introduction of CLTS in selected non-Plan programme
areas.
• It is recommended that in each of the Programme Units of
Plan China, special pilots are carried out, introducing the CLTS
approach without subsidy. This type of pilot might provide crucial
new insights on CLTS in China and show which approach is able to
ensure faster total sanitation coverage.
• Because of Plan China’s hardware subsidy approach,
it is recommended that CLTS is initially started in some non-Plan
villages. This would make the work of the field facilitators easier.
Once a few villages stop open defecation totally, they could be
used as learning ground for the Plan villages. The Natural Leaders
emerging from such successful CLTS villages should be used as resource
persons and catalysts for triggering CLTS in other villages.
• It is important to involve senior government officers from
the relevant ministries of China who might be able to influence
the development of a nation wide no subsidy sanitation policy and
who
could support launching CLTS in China.
(source:
Kamal Kar and Petra Bongartz, 2006. Update to IDS Working Paper
257 PDF)
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