Following-up on successful sanitation situations

This paper summarises the findings from a ten-year follow-up study of nine unions that achieved 100 percent sanitation coverage during a 2003-2006 Bangladesh national sanitation campaign. The unions all had been studied in 2009-2010, and four of them also in 2000 and 2001. Follow-up interviews with union chairmen were done in 2015. Some of the places had experienced multiple waves of sanitation promotion programming since the early 1990s. The authors recommend follow-up research (using RRA methods) as a way to learn from experience and gain insight into the social and technical forces affecting long-term sustainability of sanitation practices. In these cases technical quality of products was important, as were several social factors, especially family division, seasonal migration, and demographic changes, such as urbanisation and crowding. The nine unions are ranked in terms of their levels of institutional and social support for sanitation improvement.