At the beginning of 2018, the CLTS Knowledge Hub based at the Institute of Development Studies released a call for applications for a desk-based study looking at ‘the other side of gender’. The idea came out of discussions with different sanitation and hygiene (WASH) actors who felt that despite gender relations being regarded as socially constructed power relations between men and women, boys and girls - gender in WASH discussions was often being reduced to the roles and experiences of women and sometimes only to menstrual hygiene management (MHM).

Over the past two decades Bangladesh has achieved significant successes around national sanitation coverage, through increased latrine access and sanitation education campaigns, which has resulted in a large part of the country’s population shifting away from open defecation to using household concrete-lined pit latrines.  In this post I provide an outline of changes in the sanitation situation in nine Bangladesh unions, mostly rural areas, over a period of five or more years, drawn from a recently published report from Plan Alternatives for Change LLC, ‘