Following our recent East and Southern Africa regional rural sanitation workshop in Tanzania in April 2018, we are delighted to share with you the first official output from the event, a learning brief which presents the common challenges and barriers to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 that the workshop participants identified across the region.

Amongst other things, four key issues emerged:

• Reaching the ‘last mile’: leaving no one behind
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning
• Moving up the sanitation ladder
• Strengthening government systems

This learning brief summarises discussions held across the week, highlights promising practices and considers priority actions moving forward, going beyond any one approach to see how best to create participatory, community-centred programming that leads to sustainable and inclusive sanitation.

A similar event for the West and Central region will be held in Senegal in June. We see these events as an important stepping stone towards the AfricaSan conference to be held in 2019 and intend to share the key learnings and outputs from this workshop at the conference and beyond. We hope that these conversations will continue to develop in coming months, so please do share widely with colleagues.  If you have any comments, they would also be very welcome, email clts@ids.ac.uk.

Further outputs, including videos, blogs and more detailed thematic notes will shortly be available on the CLTS website.