Moving up the sanitation ladder : a participatory study of the drivers of sustainability and progress in community led total sanitation

Under the overall leadership of an international consultant, two national consultants and six VERC staff worked together on the study. They applied a multidisciplinary team approach to conduct this study, involving participatory methodologies. A total of 136 people (comprising 67 males and 69 females) participated in data generation activities to provide data on 424 family samples. Of these families, 55 were perceived as hardcore poor, 208 as poor, 158 as middle class and seven as rich.A summary of results shows that: in Manda, some 70% of people who had previously used low cost latrines had gone up the ladder by adopting ring slabs, while the remaining 30% remained using the low cost tin/mokta-made versions they had previously developed;in Sitakunda around 40% remained using their initial low cost simple pit versions, while 25% had implemented ring-slabs, a further 25% had adopted offset-pit latrines and the remaining 10% indicated that they use bamboo and shared latrines – so up to 50% had moved up the ladder, and 10% were showing signs of slippage; in the last area, Lalmohan, only 10% had stayed with their initial low cost designs, with 90% moving up the ladder to various types of offset and key hole pit latrines.[authors abstract]