Dhamrai Thana - A successful Approach for Sanitation
UNICEF (1995)
Dhaka, Bangladesh, UNICEF in collaboration with the Department of Public Health and Engineering (DPHE)
Not only safe drinking water but also sanitary latrines and good personal hygiene are necessary to reduce the incidence of life threatening diarrhoea, especially among children. In August 1992, a local NGO, Social Advancement Centre (SAC), with the help of DPHE and UNICEF, Dhaka Division, began a village sanitation project in Kushura Union of Dhamrai Thana, Bangladesh. When the project began fewer than 7% of households in some villages had sanitary latrines, but now all families in the target villages have built their own waterseal or homemade pit latrine. The success of the Kushura project has highlighted that: people need information to be motivated to change, house to house visits are effective, it is effective to focus on women, and low cost latrine technology is affordable and socially acceptable. This booklet is intended to help government departments and NGOs plan and implement a campaign to improve sanitation by presenting the Kushura experience as a practical example of a successful strategy for change.
The booklet outlines the five essential steps for a successful sanitation project; namely, alliance building, publicity, information, technical assistance and monitoring. The first important step is to build an alliance of local organizations including local government leaders, elected officials, DPHE, schools and head teachers, madrassahs, religious leaders, NGOs, women's groups and locally influential people to work on a sanitation campaign. Once the alliance has been built, training is essential. In Kushura, five volunteers, two women and three men, were trained to communicate the importance of sanitation to villagers through groups consisting of 10 families with a specially trained female leader. The Kushura project was aimed mostly at women who must understand the reasons for building latrines so that they can motivate their families to use them. Over 80% of the latrines in Kushura Union were dug by women, an important incentive for future maintenance since if people have been motivated to build a latrine, they are more likely to maintain it. The second step is to use every available method - meetings, processions, demonstrations, posters, schools, mosques, miking, radio - to make people aware of the campaign. Thirdly, it is necessary to make sure that all households, especially the women, understand the health and convenience benefits of sanitary latrines and good personal hygiene. The Kushura project was structured around meetings for women and house to house visits to explain the social and important health benefits of latrines in order to change people's habits and improve hygiene practices. The first meeting was attended by 300 school girls and group leaders from the SAC women's groups in three villages. All village women were invited to the next meetings held at village level to explain how to build a latrine. The final meetings, courtyard meetings, brought information to all women, even those who had not attended the larger meetings, and made all families feel part of the effort to improve sanitation and health. In Kushura workers found that privacy was an especially important issue for women, and the desire for privacy motivated many women to dig their own latrines. The final step is to send workers or volunteers to the village to show people how to build sanitary latrines properly, and then to monitor latrine use and maintenance and, after one or two years, to ensure that new pits are dug when the old ones are filled up.
Most villagers, when asked why they do not have a latrine, will usually answer - "We are poor people. We can not afford a latrine". But in fact, with new low cost latrine technology, poverty is generally not an issue. The real constraint is information, not poverty.
