|  | | Vita Ethiopia – Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) | | | Community led total sanitation is a community entry point strategy used by Vita in Ethiopia. CLTS is a participatory process where community members are empowered to realize the importance of cleaning up their own villages. Considerable health risks are associated with open defecation and CLTS tries to get communities to reflect on this and organize themselves to make their village open defecation free. Vita has found that CLTS is a very empowering process and communities which have successfully been bale to clean up their villages are now ready to work on other development goals. For example Vita supported CLTS work empowered the people of Dorze Haizo to clean up their community which has brought about livelihood improvements such as improved health, reduced expenditure on medicine and stimulated the formation of a women’s horticulture group and savings and credit activity.
During 2008 Vita staff in Ethiopia facilitated training of our partner organizations on CLTS and they have gone on to implement CLTS in their areas of operations.
During 2009 great progress has been made (up to July 2009). Currently 9 villages are open defecation free and CLTS is proving a very effective entry point. Hundreds of toilets have been constructed without any external support and construction of toilets has spread to other neighboring communities.
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