The role of local government and community structures in Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) monitoring

The abstract presents the experience of Plan Uganda in monitoring for Open Defecation Free (ODF) and sustainability through empowering the local government (LG) and community structures.

A three phased monitoring process over a period of 3 - 6 months is required before a community is declared ODF. The LG and community resource persons use pre-designed forms and checklists for monitoring. The community resource persons are members of village health teams, or natural or local leaders.

Plan Uganda together with the LG staff agree on key indicators, levels and frequency of monitoring. There is also a feedback mechanism where results of the monitoring are shared with the target communities for action.

The data collected is shared with the district officials who disseminate it to the national level to update the CLTS data base. This has enabled the tracking of national ODF progress. Monitoring has also been conducted during the post-ODF phase to enable community members not to lapse to OD and ensure that new migrants and newly married people with new houses construct latrines.

CLTS monitoring has fostered participation, learning and flexibility through recognizing
the role of local people in planning and managing environmental sanitation, offering
them an opportunity to learn from their own change. Furthermore it has promoted the
use of existing structures, built capacity of LG, enhanced scaling up of CLTS, ODF
attainment and sustainability.

Through this effective monitoring mechanism Plan Uganda together with the local government has been able to ensure that over 78 communities have been declared ODF within a period of two years in two districts. Moreover, an entire sub county with 40 villages has been certified ODF, the first of its kind in Uganda.