Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine innovations in approaches to sanitation services for public health, within the field of international development programming over the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) period. It will ask how innovation has differed in rural and urban settings and changed over the period.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine innovations in approaches to sanitation services for public health, within the field of international development programming over the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) period (2000 to 2015). It will ask how innovation has differed in rural and urban settings and changed over the period. It will examine to what extent innovations have been able to transition from one setting to the other, how this process has influenced them, and to what extent they differ from historical examples of sanitation development for public health.

The paper will focus on the development of community-led total sanitation, originally a form of participatory development for rural villages in Bangladesh, but now implemented nationwide in many African countries and having undergone many adaptations (e.g. 'school-led total sanitation'; 'urban community-led total sanitation', 'CLTS+'). This will be contrasted with the technology driven approach to urban sanitation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's 'reinvent the toilet' campaign. This has been influential in refocusing the sanitation sector on on-site sanitation solutions for urban areas, and reconfigured the debate around faecal waste management, but has yet to provide a solution which reaches the scale of uptake of CLTS.

The paper will draw on academic and 'grey' literature describing the development of sanitation solutions and the challenges that have been experienced in attempting to achieve 'scale' and 'sustainability'. This will lead to a discussion of the socio-political and micro-economic characteristics determining the uptake or rejection of these innovations in different contexts.