During more than 20 years of civil conflict in both Somalia and South Sudan, sanitation interventions
were mostly limited to construction of emergency latrines for affected populations or education on
sanitation and hygiene (using the Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST)
approach) followed by fully subsidized latrine programmes for selected households.

There is little evidence that these interventions achieved the desired results: recent surveys in
Somalia show that access to sanitation actually decreased between 1995 and 2012. Open defecation
(OD) levels are very high in both countries with correspondingly high levels of diarrhoea and frequent
outbreaks of cholera. Baseline data is unreliable but some studies (JMP, 2013) indicate that OD is as
high as 83% in rural communities in Somalia. South Sudan has the worst OD rates in sub-Saharan Africa at 77% nationally (JMP, 2012).

With this background in mind, UNICEF WASH teams in both countries decided to introduce CLTS.

This Field Note describes the experiences of implementing CLTS programmes in these fragile
contexts with recommendations on where the approach needs to be adapted to be applied in
these settings.

Download the Field Note

This Field Note is part of the UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Sanitation and Hygiene Learning Series, designed to improve knowledge of best practice and lessons learnt in sanitation and hygiene programming across the Region. The series has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationin support of improved knowledge management in the sanitation sector. The documents in this series cover the following topics:

•     CLTS at-scale
•     Small towns sanitation
•     Mobile-enabled sanitation and hygiene programming
•     Regional supply chains for sanitation
•     Sanitation marketing
•     Handwashing with soap
•     CLTS in fragile contexts