Memorandum submitted by Robert Chambers
and John Thompson, Institute of Development Studies, University
of Sussex
This memorandum is supplementary to the submissions
by the Institute of Development Studies and by Sandy Cairncross
and others. We are writing it in our personal capacities. It concerns
the potentials and implications of Community-Led Total Sanitation
(CLTS) and of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). In our
view, both have immense potential for enhancing human wellbeing,
especially for the poor, and both face obstacles in professional
and bureaucratic mindsets and modes of operation and in top-down
large budget aid disbursements. This is not conventional wisdom.
Both CLTS and SRI embody multiple heresies; but as T H Huxley
famously said "...it is the customary fate of new truths
to begin as heresies...". This is not an argument for less
aid. Far from it. It is an argument for more understanding, more
discrimination of cases, more staff able to make these discriminations,
more relatively small fine-pointed grants to support innovation
and spread, and more staff, or a new organisation, able to make
them. We understand that there is a proposal to reduce DFID staff
by 20%. This betrays ignorance of field realities and would diminish
the efficiency and effectiveness of British aid. It would be a
shocking own goal and the losers would be poor people.
COMMUNITY-LED
TOTAL SANITATION
CLTS (see http://www.livelihoods.org/hot topics/CLTS.html)
entails not hardware or engineering but facilitation. It is a
process through which members of a community are facilitated to
appraise and analyse the effects of their habits of open defaecation
(extremely widespread in rural South Asia, and also in other parts
of Asia, Africa and Latin America). The CLTS process entails social
mapping including areas of defaecation, transects and inspections,
analysis of the pathways from faeces to the mouth, calculations
of total volumes produced by individuals, households and communities,
and amounts ingested. People are then often so disgusted that
they decide collectively to become open-defaecation free (ODF).
There are no standard or required designs for latrines and no
subsidies. It is up to the community to decide how to help the
poorest, if they need it, since this is in the interests of all.
CLTS was evolved in Bangladesh in 1999 by Kamal
Kar, a Participatory Rural Appraisal facilitator, through Water
Aid and the Bangladeshi NGO VERC. It has since been spread through
support of the Water and Sanitation Programme of the World Bank
and through NGOs, and has been espoused at least in name by some
Governments. Where CLTS truly occurs, informal indications are
transformative benefits for all, especially women and children,
sharp improvements in, and lower expenditures on, health, and
livelihood gains.
The real extent and nature of the spread and
the grass roots realities of CLTS are subjects of DFID-funded
research by the Institute of Development Studies. Spread is reported
to have been rapid in parts of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, and
Indonesia and starts have been made in Bolivia, Nepal and parts
of Africa. One priority is to establish what are favourable and
what unfavourable conditions for triggering CLTS. When a recent
workshop in Indonesia, including field facilitators, brainstormed
these conditions, the top unfavourable condition was a programme
of hardware subsidy (which deters self-help), and the top favourable
condition was good teamwork. In both cases the second condition
was the quality of facilitation.
The message is clear and counters convention.
The spread of CLTS does not require much money. MDG thinking which
looks at the cost of providing and subsidising a service and then
arrives at a budget by multiplying out by the population is self-defeating
with CLTS. This does not affect the case for bigger budgets for
urban sanitation or for the sector as a whole. But for CLTS, so
far almost entirely rural, the mindset that to achieve more requires
a much bigger budget is a misfit. The country head of an INGO
who converted from hardware subsidy to CLTS enabled severalfold
more people to benefit and to benefit more, but was in trouble
with his head office in the UK for spending only 20% of his budget.
A large aid-grant for CLTS pushed an NGO off course. It had to
find ways to spend the budget instead of recruiting and supporting
a few key facilitators and trainers who might have had a much
greater impact for perhaps a tenth of the cost.
The potential gains from CLTS are immense and
could benefit hundreds of millions of poor rural people. They
are unlikely to be achieved as long as MDG big budget thinking
is dominant, not only in supporting hardware subsidies, but in
making too much money available. They are unlikely to be achieved
as long as lender and donor agencies and governments support inappropriate
rural hardware subsidies. Changes of perception, mindset, incentives
and behaviour are needed at all levels in the aid chain. DFID
probably has more experience of CLTS than any other agency except
the World Bank, and so is exceptionally well placed to help other
organisations like UNICEF learn. To do this well, and to orient
British aid better, will require more staff who understand and
are committed to the need for sensitive restraint in providing
the conditions for the spread of CLTS. Spending more on such staff,
and restraining budgets for rural sanitation in conditions favourable
for CLTS, could be one of the most cost-effective forms of aid.
THE SYSTEM
OF RICE
INTENSIFICATION
SRI, like CLTS, flies in the face of conventional
thinking and practice. It entails doing almost everything "wrong"
(in the eyes of both farmers and scientists): transplanting seedlings
much earlier, with greater care, as single plants not clumps,
not closely spaced but widely, aerating not flooding the soil,
and weeding between plants with a roller. The result is, from
the same seed, a plant with such a different architecture, mirrored
in its healthy and branching rooting system, that farmers think
it is a different variety. Unlike CLTS there have been numerous
scientific studies of yields and synergies (see http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/index.html).
And more than CLTS it is spreading itself, farmer to farmer. SRI
has spread widely, often slowly at first, then exponentially,
for example in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, with the use of
80-90% less seed, and usually sharp gains in yields, in returns
to water, and also to labour especially after the first year.
The verdict of history may well be that gains in food production
from SRI, at negligible cost, will have exceeded those from multi-million
dollar long-term research on engineering and breeding a new rice
plant. Moreover, these gains from SRI can occur now whereas those
from a new rice plant would be at a much later date, if indeed,
at all. And in the longer term, the gain in the productivity of
water may prove at least as important as the productivity of land
as a contribution from SRI.
SRI has generated an important and exciting
research agenda. This includes much more attention to rooting
systems (IIRI is reported to have no one working on roots), to
soil biota, to rhizobia and their migration within the rice plant,
and to the shortening of phyllochrons—the intervals between
tillering. One big question is whether the rice-growing upper
reaches of large irrigation systems like Nagarjunasagar and Tungabhadra
in India can adopt SRI and, through a win-win, increase their
yields while releasing water for the water-scarce areas lower
on the systems. There is also the question of the application
of SRI principles to other crops, already under way with millet.
Unfortunately some rice scientists of standing have been in a
state of denial, ridiculing SRI, disputing the findings, and failing
to change their priorities. But others, especially in national
research systems, and political leaders in water-scarce rice-growing
areas, have seen the potential and are promoting SRI. And tens
or hundreds of thousands of farmers can't be wrong. Here again
there is scope for DFID to examine the evidence, take a lead and
vigorously support moves towards this new research agenda.
CONCLUSION
Significantly, both CLTS and SRI are complex
innovations in software, concerned with behaviour in communities
and on farms, and not with engineering, whether of latrines or
genes. To promote and improve them requires DFID to recruit more
staff who can learn and understand, and to spare them pressures
to spend money. Sharply increasing the staff to disbursement ratio
would sharply increase the pro-poor cost-effectiveness of our
aid programme. In our view, we owe this to the poor people of
our world.
In addition, (but especially if the Treasury
cannot see the need for more staff, or sees it but still will
not allow it), we recommend that DFID create an R and D organisation
similar to SAREC in Sweden and IDRC (International Development
Research Centre) in Canada. There is no British equivalent. This
would work in partnership with existing research bodies. The need
for such an organisation is suggested by a recent large grant
from DFID to IDRC. Such a research-focused organisation would
be an incubator for ideas and would support the development and
spread of promising innovations. There would be many applications
in the sanitation, water and agriculture fields besides CLTS and
SRI but these could be two starting points.
January 2007
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