Sanitation Participation: mapping roads from invisible to I'm visible

Having discussed WTD in my previous upload, I want to return to the final thought I made within it. Specifically, is it enough to celebrate sanitation only once a year, or do we need an approach that redirects our attention, and therefore our solutions, to the everyday? To answer this, I want to draw upon the questions I identified through the Akan case study and explore the areas of Community Total led Sanitation (CTLS) and Participatory GIS Mapping (PGISM) that have captured my interest.

Everyday Sanitation and CLTS

Synthesising the lessons that emerged from Akan , I think it seems obvious that to make sanitary progress we must first accept that sanitation is socially awkward and marginalising. Only then can we actively dismantle these culturally conditioned perspectives, and purposefully act in ways that brings sanitation into the everyday. In other words, acknowledge local taboos exist and then respectfully flush them away. This sounds straightforward, but how might we go about achieving this in various communities?

I believe a primary step is building up from the poignant framework of “Everyday Sanitation"(McFarlane et al, 2011), which brings attention to the local socio-political components (perceptions, power relations, expetriences etc.) that disrupt sanitation. This is an important conceptualisation, one that recognises sanitation as a "process with an obvious everyday rhythm” (pg992), to better capitalise on the day-to-day functionality of communities. By tapping into this rhythm, and utilising community knowledge to better understand its local flows, the interconnected processes through which sanitation plays out can be identified, showcased and improved. 

Importantly for this discussion, 2 objectives fundamentally underpin ‘The Everyday’ framework, providing a structure through which I hope to weave the engaging methods of CLTS and PGISM.

Objective 1: Identifying key concerns for intervention based on everyday experience

CLTS is fundamentally about bringing sanitation into the everyday. As explained by Zuin (2019), rather than pushing sanitary hardware and designs that aren’t always suitable for local contexts, CLTS crucially focusses on facilitating behavioural changes through community self-enforcement and open dialogue. Many authors have explored its actualisation (I would encourage you to read Kar and Chambers 2008), however, for the purpose of this blog, I believe the following video examining CLTS in Niger does a wonderful job explaining!

Referring back to 'The Unmentionable' problems demonstrated in Akan, CLTS firstly provides a key methodology in overcoming invisibility. By leveraging powerful emotional drivers, such as shame and disgust, socially embedded and detrimental behaviours are challenged head on, enabling communities to ‘latrine away’ their own taboos. The result is not only a significant impact on health, but an embracing of hygienic practices that benefit whole communities. 

Of course, in acknowledging the success shown here in Niger, we must recognise that rural spaces are often more homogeneous and community focussed, which could conceivably allow these methods to thrive. Once again we are forced to consider - how do we translate such practices to more complex urban environments?

Objective 2: Identifying how the everyday experience of sanitation is socio-spatially differentiated

In considering the complexity of urban environments, ‘Grey Areas’ (GAs) and ‘Multiple Hidden Actors’ (MHA) are core obstacles that need to be addressed (Srivastava et al. 2019). GAs refer to urban settlements that have fallen out of municipal jurisdiction, often due to their informal (or "illegal") nature, where population density and space severely limit safe sanitation. MHAs reflect Ghana's Krufoo and India's manual scavengers. They are informal providers of sanitation that are often neglected by the state. Here is where we see the actualisation of sanitary problems being fundamentally embedded in uneven development. So how can we attempt to mitigate this?

Many components of the CLTS framework could be applied. Indeed, the aspects of normalisation and communication highlighted in Niger are always fundamental first steps. In urban environments, however, I personally think the additional work being achieved in participatory mapping is fascinating. It is undeniable that maps shift power, with development discourse increasingly recognising PGISM as allowing communities to embed themselves in urban power structures (Panek, 2015). Indeed, “Creating an own map within a community has an empowering effect, because members of the community have the opportunity to think spatially about their environment and literally put their community on the map” (pg28). With companies like Google creating collaborative partnerships that improve global South capabilities around community mapping, the opportunity to utilise these methods is also becoming increasingly accessible. 

Of course, theory is all well and good, but seeing these techniques play out in practice is where I think the opportunities really shine.

Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe

In Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe, the SHARE CityWide Sanitation Project has integrated profiling and mapping into its partnerships with local governments to enable co-production of sanitation innovation. By training locals and providing them with the means to collect spatial data, 11 settlements throughout the city were profiled to provide visual depictions of “sanitation blind spots”. The methodology allowed local authorities to understand the reality faced by these settlements, providing residents a sense of ownership over the sanitation planning that would better their communities. 

Slum Dwellers International (SDI) 

The SDI ‘Know Your City’ campaign is a phenomenal movement based on "Hard Data and Rich Stories". Although not solely focussed on sanitation, the campaign does have health and sanitation as core components, which, combined with data collection on an array of different aspects, makes their website a truly interesting place to explore! For a better idea of what the SDI campaign is about, I’ve included a video below. I would encourage you to check both of these resources out!

Where have we landed?

In this post, I’ve highlighted how CLTS and PGISM, under a framework of The Everyday, exemplify bottom-up empowerment that allow communities to communicate and own their sanitary needs. Enabling community members to be seen and heard around sanitation, whilst normalising and encouraging their occurrence, are therefore fundamental components of tackling 'The Unmentionable' and translating it between rural and urban environments.

However, while it is clear these themes are persistent in communities, I have thus far generalised African voices as if they are all homogeneous and all equally valued. This is a problematic inference to make! Voices in all communities and all societies are differently heard and acted up. Thus, for my next post, I believe it is important to explore whose voice is heard and whose is not.