Earth Report: Clean Living

Earth Report: Clean Living

 
Forty per cent of the world’s population are without access to a latrine or toilet. In the International Year of Sanitation, Earth Report travels to Bangladesh to discover changing rural attitudes to hygiene. More and more villages are introducing their own sanitation and building their own toilets. Instead of top-down solutions, a new approach – Community Led Total Sanitation – has eradicated ‘open defecation’ in more than 300 villages.
 
Earth Report 'Clean Living' is broadcast on BBC World at the following times (all times quoted as UK time zone currently GMT):
 
Friday 14th March - 20:30, with repeats at 04.30 on Saturday 15 March; 10:30 on Monday 17 March; 15:30 on Tuesday 18 March; and 02:30 and 08:30 on Wednesday 19 March.
 
For more information on programme schedules in local time zones visit www.bbcworld.com
 
Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world, yet half the population don’t have access to proper sanitation. It means they are forced to use areas around their villages as their toilet - including fields and rivers. Wandering livestock spreads the faeces around. It contaminates homes and food and the resulting diarrhoeal diseases, according to WaterAid, kill 125,000 children under the age of five, every year.  
 
But a remarkable change is taking place. Health worker Kamal Kar is helping communities change their sanitation habits. He’s not doing this by giving away free or subsidised toilets but by encouraging people to fix their own sanitation problems. He calls this approach ‘Community Led Total Sanitation’, or CLTS.  
 
The villagers are asked to draw a map of their village using blue powder. Then they are asked to put yellow powder in places where they defecate. The team then show how easily people and livestock spread faeces around the village, even inside people’s homes.
 
While using toilets helps stop the spread of diarrhoeal diseases, there are other surprising benefits. Once the land previously used as a lavatory is cleaned up, the villagers can grow food on it. This is particularly important during the time of Monga – the period of seasonal hunger between sowing and harvest when there’s no work.
 
“There is a huge amount of local knowledge that exists in the minds of the people and engineering knowledge for that matter, and they go on to form whole innovative approaches and develop things.  But if we bring the technology and prescription from outside it blocks them.” Kamal Kar, Community Sanitation Expert
 
“We didn’t realise before that open defecation can cause a lot of diseases like diarrhoea and cholera. That’s why we are digging this toilet now.” Villager
 
“CLTS has now spread to nine different villages around here, and out of those 5 have 100 per cent toilet coverage and the other 4 partial work has been done.” CARE Worker
 
Clean Living was produced with the help of the UK Department for International Development (DFID); UN Water; UNICEF and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council.
 
TVE and its Partners distribute Earth Report programmes for broadcast and educational and campaigning use in countries across Africa, Asia & the Pacific, and Latin America & the Caribbean – to schools, colleges, universities, NGOs, environmental agencies and other ‘multiplier’ organisations.
 
Contacts and information:
 
For further information on the programme, production team and issues raised look up www.tve.org/earthreport
 
DFID’s work on water and sanitation www.dfid.gov.uk/mdg/water.asp
 
UN Water www.unwater.org/
 
Unicef’s work on water www.unicef.org/wes/index.html
 
Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council’s work www.wsscc.org/