Shame instead of subsidies: CLTS helped take Nepal from 10% to 70% toilets

Community-Led Total Sanitation emerged in Bangladesh around 2001 as a reversal of toilet-subsidy programs. Instead of building latrines for people, a facilitator leads villagers on a hunt through their own village — in Jiling, central Nepal, Sanjay Devkota of the UN-Habitat Global Sanitation Fund program walked rice-field paths until someone spotted a pile, then asked the household beside it how they felt about it, and whether the flies on it stayed at their house or visited the neighbors'.

The discomfort is the design. Alison Bradley of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council explains the point is for people to feel open defecation is dirty and wrong for their community — so that villagers like 69-year-old Shanta Bahadur Tamang ('I built a toilet. If I can do it, why can't other people?') pressure their neighbors into building their own. Jiling targeted open-defecation-free status by September; Nepal's government wanted the whole country on toilets by 2017.

The direction of travel was real: as late as 1990 only 10% of Nepali homes had toilets, and by 2016 about 70% did — mostly simple squat latrines people had built themselves, which is precisely why, CLTS argues, they get used rather than repurposed.

Subsidised toilets went unused because recipients hadn't chosen them — demand, not supply, was the constraint.

The facilitated walk makes an invisible public-health hazard visible, personal and embarrassing in a single afternoon.

Social pressure is self-sustaining: once a village sets an open-defecation-free goal, neighbors enforce it for free.

Ownership beats handouts for behavior-change infrastructure. A subsidy buys a toilet; disgust and peer pressure buy a habit.

CLTS spread from Bangladesh across the developing world as the standard alternative to latrine subsidies, with the WSSCC and partners such as UN-Habitat running facilitated programs toward national open-defecation-free targets like Nepal's 2017 goal.