Since the launch of the ODF campaign in 2011 UNICEF has supported the Ministry of Health to scale up sanitation activities with CLTS as its core strategy. The Department of  Environmental Health (DEHS) within the ministry has demonstrated strong leadership and is a clear champion for sanitation and hygiene. Sanitation services have been devolved to the county government under the new constitution (2010) and CLTS implementation is now being led by the County Health Teams. Individual champions for CLTS at county level have been found to be critical to its success and include elected officials and technical officers in public health offices.

By 2013, the government had rolled out CLTS in 41 out of 47 counties and trained more than 1727 facilitators (Microplan, 2015). Despite the successes of the roll out and the steady increase in certified ODF villages, there had been reports of villages reverting back to ODF. The reasons for this reversion were not clear and sanitation actors needed more information about the causes to understand how to prevent it. Consequently, UNICEF Kenya designed and carried out a study into the sustainability of ODF practices in rural areas of Kenya, to ensure that future CLTS efforts result in sustainable progress. The findings from this study are used in this Field Note as evidence of Kenya’s progress towards its national development goals in sanitation and to present the lessons learnt about what is contributing to the successes and failures of ODF sustainability.

Download this UNICEF WASH Field Note.

This note is part of UNICEF’s Sanitation and Hygiene Learning Series which is being developed in collaboration with UNICEF Country Offices.