Workshop: Five million people get access to latrines

Two-day workshop discusses details and results of ongoing sanitation programme.

ISLAMABAD:

Around five million more people in Pakistan now have access to latrines.

The details and results of the ongoing “Early Recovery Programme on Rural Sanitation in Flood-affected Areas” were shared during a two-day workshop that began at a private hotel here on Thursday. The programme is a joint initiative by Unicef, Plan Pakistan and implementing partners and has three main objectives – 100% safe disposal of excretory material in rural areas, a movement to construct latrines inside homes and spreading health and hygiene knowledge among people.

The programme started with funding from Unicef after the 2010 floods and aims to target seven million people in 33 districts across the country in several phases. It uses a novel technique called the Pakistan Approach to Total Sanitation, developed specifically for the country by organisations working for improving sanitation.

“There is a big gap between demand creation of sanitation and the supply side in Pakistan,” said Plan’s Country Manager Imran Yousaf Shami. “So once we motivated people to adopt sanitation and safe hygiene practices, we looked at the supply side as well by setting up sanitation markets closer to their homes.”

Hendrik Van Norden, Unicef’s regional director for sanitation and hygiene, said he was sceptical about the project initially, but the results have been encouraging. “I thought for people who have lost everything in the floods, sanitation might not be their top priority,” he said.

However, a survey of 439 households that were part of the programme showed that 71% people self-financed the construction of a latrine in their house. The programme involved reaching out to rural communities through community resource persons.

Shahzad, a villager from Mardan District, said he got involved with the programme when a resource person visited his village to raise awareness about sanitation. Since then, people in his village have made closed enclosures for dumping garbage, constructed latrines in their homes, started washing their hands with soap and cleaning their streets regularly.

“We are not dropping latrines, we are facilitating a learning process in communities to help them construct their own toilets. It’s an approach that relies on behavioural change,” said Unicef’s director for water, sanitation and hygiene Simone Klawitter.

“To reach out to millions of people who are still defecating in the open, they would need the help of provincial governments,” she added.

Federal Secretary for Climate Change Mehmood Alam said his ministry is working towards reducing the number of people without access to sanitation by half.

“Public and private efforts have collectively brought up the rate of people with access to sanitation to 48% from 34% in 1990 and Pakistan is well on its way to achieve the millennium development goal of 67% by 2018.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14^th, 2012.