Global Waters Radio: Piet deVries on Sanitation Behavior Change in Liberia
“When you’re looking at behavior change projects, it is very important to have it locally contextualized.”
Piet deVries is Senior WASH Specialist and Liberia Country Director for Global Communities, a Maryland-based NGO with programs in more than 20 countries around the world. In his recent sit-down with Global Waters Radio, deVries discussed his experiences in Liberia promoting community-led total sanitation (CLTS) over the past several years, as former chief of party for USAID/Liberia’s Improved Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (IWASH) program.
CLTS is a methodology originally pioneered in Bangladesh that seeks to create sustainable improvements in community sanitation by prioritizing public education and equipping communities with the skills needed to build and maintain their own improved sanitation facilities. CLTS also encourages community members to support the behavioral changes necessary to eliminate the public health threats posed by open defecation — a common practice in much of rural West Africa.
“We realized that community-led total sanitation could be very successful. But it was extremely difficult and logistically challenging.”
Countries around the world have experimented with CLTS since the late 1990s, producing encouraging if inconsistent results. What specific factors then explain the rise, popularity, and effectiveness of CLTS in Liberia? For the answers, click below to listen to the full Global Waters Radio interview, and let us know what you think.
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Global Waters Radio is a podcast series produced by the Water Team at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The series offers listeners insights from USAID officials, development partners, thought leaders and experts from across the water sector as they discuss current USAID water programming and cutting-edge research from around the world. Have a topic you would like to see covered in a future Global Waters Radio podcast? Please contact us at waterteam@usaid.gov, and follow us on Twitter @USAIDWater.
