When planning or making changes in household or community sanitation, keep in mind that every sanitation method should do these things:

Because people have different sanitation needs, decisions about sanitation should be made by the people who will be most affected by those decisions. And because household and neighborhood sanitation decisions can affect people downstream, communities need to work together to improve sanitation for all.

Community participation can make the difference between success and failure when a government or outside agency plans a sanitation program. When local people participate in sanitation planning, the result is more likely to fit local needs.

In 1992, the government of El Salvador spent over 10 million dollars to build thousands of new toilets. The new toilets were different from the kind that local people were used to, and needed more care and cleaning than normal toilets. There was no training in how to use them, and the government did not invite communities to help make them.

After the project was done, the government did a study to find out how the toilets were being used. They learned that a large number of the toilets were not being used well, and many were not used at all.

People have different ideas about who should clean toilets. Even in a single household, this can be a difficult problem to resolve in a way that satisfies everyone.

Often, the job of planning, building, and fixing toilets is considered men's work or work for specialists. But the less pleasant and more constant task of cleaning toilets often falls to women or people of lower social classes. If tasks that are necessary but unpleasant always fall to people with no voice in making decisions, it is unfair. And in the long run, it can lead to these tasks being done poorly, or not being done at all.

Sharing unpleasant tasks is a way to ensure that the work gets done.

While women have needs for safe and healthy sanitation, they may not have the money, resources, power, or confidence to ensure that their needs are met. Leaving women out of sanitation planning puts them at a greater risk of health problems. This increases their burden even more.

Men must provide incentives for women to participate in community sanitation in a way that does not simply give them more work to do, especially the most unpleasant tasks. This requires:

Women usually teach and care for children. When women's needs are not met, the needs of future generations may be unmet as well. When women are not included in planning household and community sanitation, the whole community suffers.

This activity helps people to talk about issues that may prevent women from having access to safe and healthy sanitation. The goal is to decide what changes might be necessary to improve health for everyone. After the activity has been done with just women, a session can be organized with both men and women.

Step 1. Write statements about sanitation on a flipchart or large piece of paper. Then read each statement to the group, and ask each person to decide whether she agrees or disagrees. (Ask people to raise a hand if they agree, or to make no motion if they do not.) For every "yes" answer, make a mark next to the phrase. For every "no" answer, make no mark. Here are some statements that might be used.

Step 2. Count the marks beside each statement. Choose the problems that were mentioned most and begin a discussion about them. What is the cause of the problem? What illnesses may result from this problem? What can be done to improve the situation? What are the barriers to improving the situation?

Step 3. End with the group deciding on some specific actions that can be taken by both men and women to ensure that everyone's needs are met.

In cities and towns that lack sufficient water and sanitation, serious health problems can spread very quickly. But because of the crowded and built-up nature of cities, it is difficult to improve sanitation services without a lot of help from local or national governments, NGO's, and other international development partners. This book can only offer some guidelines to help think about possible solutions.

The main barriers to good sanitation services in cities are:

Not long ago, Yoff was a typical West African fishing village outside of Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. Families lived in compounds connected by walking paths and open spaces. But as Dakar grew and swallowed Yoff, it became part of a large urban area with an international airport and a lot of car traffic.

As the town grew, many houses installed flush toilets connected to tanks to collect the sewage. When the tanks filled up, people pumped them out into open pits where the sewage sat and bred disease. Other people who were too poor to afford toilets used open sandy areas to fulfill their needs. But with many people living close together, this quickly became a health problem. A town development committee came together to solve these problems. They began by looking at the resources they had: strong community networks, skilled builders, and people committed to keeping village life. They also had some new ideas about ecological sanitation.

In the village, houses were grouped around open common areas where people could gather and talk. After talking to many villagers, the committee made a plan to use this open area for a sanitation system that would make the area more attractive, rather than uglier. Instead of promoting household toilets and underground sewage tanks, they would promote community ecological sanitation. The committee worked with residents to build urine-diverting dry toilets. Each set of toilets would be shared by the whole compound. The urine would run through pipes into beds of reeds. The feces, after being dried out, would be used to fertilize trees. All of this would help to keep the village green. Local masons and builders were hired to construct the toilets and to maintain the common areas. This urban sanitation project not only prevented health problems - it helped to preserve the way the people of Yoff wanted to live.

Urban sanitation does not have to use large water-based systems. In fact, in most of the world, large water-based systems cause more problems than they solve. Water-based sanitation systems produce large amounts of dirty water that must be treated before it can be reused. If it is not purified - and it usually is not ? this leads to serious environmental and health problems.

If urban sanitation services are combined with urban farming, parks, garbage collection, and energy production, cities can become healthier and more beautiful places to live. When community groups work with local governments to come up with creative solutions, the result will be greener, healthier cities.