Sharing insights at Ghana’s WEDC Conference
In July our Urban Sanitation and Hygiene Specialist, Beth Lomas, presented a research paper at the Water, Engineering and Development Centre Conference in Kumasi, Ghana, sharing insights from SEED's application of the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach to halting open defecation. This approach includes using shocking and taboo imagery to appeal to long-term behaviour change. Read on to hear Beth’s take on her exciting week in Kumasi!
Landing late in the evening, the hot and humid air of Accra was buzzing with activity, an enticing welcome to my week long trip to Ghana. Once I’d made my way to the guest house, I found many fellow conference delegates who I’d be spending the next few days with. As we tucked into our first Ghanaian meal, we found ourselves deep in conversation about the potential of utilising worms for composting human poo - a sign of the things to come!
To some this might sound like a slightly strange dinner conversation, but this group had come together from all over the world precisely because of our passion for all things water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and composting poo is just one of many solutions to the global sanitation crisis. And on this first night in Ghana, it was great to meet some of the people I would be learning so many insights from throughout the week.
The conference would be an exciting platform for over 500 delegates to listen and share their research findings; sharing knowledge and lessons learned from projects around the world. To enable me to present research from SEED’s urban sanitation project in Madagascar, I was fortunate to secure funding from the CLTS Knowledge Hub at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. The CLTS Knowledge Hub aims to bring together practitioners working on community sanitation projects to help share knowledge and insights from the field.
The next day we travelled through the lush green landscape towards Kumasi, a five hour drive, where the driver tried to distract us with amusingly dramatic Ghanaian soap operas. Once we arrived at our bustling destination and made ourselves familiar with the town, we made plans for the coming week and continued our discussions on recent global sanitation research.
Our week kicked off with an all day workshop on CLTS, which stands for Community-Led Total Sanitation, a methodology which encourages communities to take action to improve their own sanitation situation and move away from defecating in the open, which unfortunately remains the only option for over a billion people worldwide. My role was to help facilitate discussion among participants and ensure that all the important insights and research were documented.
The following day was the official opening ceremony of the conference. We were greeted by traditional Ghanaian drummers and a poet who had written a special piece to wish us well with the proceedings. Keynote speakers followed, explaining the importance of the conference theme, ‘Ensuring Availability and Sustainable Management of Water and Sanitation for All’, identifying some of the current challenges and the many of the ongoing achievements in this area. The theme drew on the global call for improved sanitation from the recently announced Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs follow the Millennium Development Goals, acknowledging the successes and shortcomings of the MDGs, and over the next fifteen years will aim to significantly reduce extreme poverty and many of its dimensions. The SDGs focus on the universal access to services and reduction of poverty, aiming to leave no one behind. For the WASH sector, this means universal access to improved sanitation and water sources by 2030 and reducing the avoidable diseases spread by the lack of adequate toilets and clean water.
Filled with inspiration of the integral importance of universal access to clean water and sanitation from the opening speeches, we started the conference presentations. Over three days, practitioners and researchers shared their important work and received questions from the audience. When the time came for me to speak about SEED’s Project Malio, discussing our experience of using controversial images to ignite behaviour change, I was encouraged by how engaged the audience was. Earlier this year Project Malio had begun to pilot these images, and the reactions of the community members and opinion leaders, as well as staff within the organisation itself, were extremely varied. These reactions subsequently became the topic of some extensive research by the Malio team, focusing on the impact of social norms on behaviour change and the effect of pushing traditionally taboo boundaries. Many other conference participants had similar in-field experiences working in behaviour change communication and were really interested in listening, sharing and debating this interesting topic. Even after the presentation further lively discussion continued, and I had the chance to exchange details with staff working on similar projects, who were interested to maintain an information sharing network, and keen to keep up with SEED’s progress and the achievements of the Project Malio more generally.
Following many incredibly interesting and ground-breaking research presentations, the last two days were concerned with practical workshops run by large international NGOs. The topics were varied and the sessions highly interactive, focusing on building capacity of participants in different skills. It was a further opportunity to access many important skills and practical lessons learned from around the world and take knowledge back to the team in Madagascar, where we are always looking to improve and adapt our project working. I attended a UNICEF session on creating inclusive WASH programming, looking at menstrual hygiene management and gender, as well as an outcome mapping planning workshop by Participatory Development Associates. I also was able to attend a field trip to a waste treatment site to look at how Kumasi is trying to tackle faecal sludge management, supported by an organisation called Water Sanitation for the Urban Poor.
As the drummers played out their final beats at the closing ceremony, we reflected on all the important discussions and research learnings we had gained from the week. Ghana had welcomed us with open arms, but also provided a practical illustration of the importance universal access to improved WASH. While a magnificent host, Ghana still has 5 million people who use an unsafe water source and 4000 children die every year from diarrhoea, often caused by lack of adequate toilets. The location of the conference carried an important reminder that despite global progress, there is still a long way to go to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of universal WASH access for all.
If you’d like to take a look at the paper Beth presented, check out the CLTS Knowledge Hub!










