CLTS versus other approaches to promote sanitation: rivalry or complementarity

Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a no-subsidy approach increasingly used in development projects and programs to promote hygiene and sanitation improvements in communities. Notwithstanding significant success in decreasing open-air defecation, CLTS still faces many challenges, and its impacts and sustainability are limited by competing approaches, fall-backs (“slippage”) and difficulties to “move up the sanitation ladder” and sustain achievements over time. This article argues that instead of considering CLTS and traditional subsidized approaches as opposing, these approaches should be seen as complementary as they address different links of the same chain: while CLTS boosts demand creation, subsidized approaches increase supply. These approaches, together with new techniques such as sanitation marketing, should therefore be smartly combined to address the whole sanitation services chain and therefore achieve sustainable access to improved sanitation.