ODF Sustainability Study in 10 provinces of Afghanistan:

Role: Study

Budget: 12,086,720.05 AFN

Duration: Sep 2016-Oct 2017

Funder: UNICEF, Afghanistan

The overall purpose of the Study was to document the success, or lack of success, in introducing and sustaining changes in community sanitation practices after exposure to the CLTS method in rural Afghanistan, to understand which (disaggregated by sex and age) community members continue to uphold ODF status after triggering, and to begin to explain why some do not; and to contribute more broadly to knowledge on the sustainability of CLTS in Afghanistan, to enhance program implementation and outcomes in the future. Specific objectives of the Study were to find out:

  1. How many communities are still ODF; and if they are not either to concretely identify or surmise from available evidence why they are not;
  2. The key factors associated with communities remaining ODF or slipping after a minimum of two years after being declared ODF. Here, efforts have been made whenever possible to disaggregate data at a minimum by sex and age; and where possible, to provide information on other social indicators that might inflect the surrounding circumstances of a community’s behaviours, including, for example, displacement into or out of a community by armed conflict, etc.
  3. The key factors (both social and technical) that can explain the success or failure of the CLTS approach in a community context – with the caveat that collecting ‘whole-of-community’ data in Afghanistan is complicated by the social and security constraints explained above.
  4. What percentage of people in ODF communities practice hand-washing with soap at critical times, with an effort to disaggregate this information by sex and age wherever possible;
  5. Key factors at various levels (from community to policy levels) related to government and NGO interventions which improve the adherence to new ODF behaviours created by CLTS interventions; or, factors which may be detracting from such efforts, even when these may at first seem ‘invisible’ because of norms about behaviours based on sex, age, class, etc.

The study covered (at least) 10% of all communities declared ODF in rural Afghanistan at least two years prior to the start of the survey. As per the defined scope of work in the ToR, it was agreed that the sample size be 70 communities in  8 provinces including Badakshan, Bamyan, Daikundi, Kapisa, Laghman, Logar, Nangrahar, and Takhar, 

A total of seven tools were used for the mixed methods assessment using a technique called Quantified Participatory Assessment (QPA). The tools included Key Person Interviews with Province Officials, Key Person Interviews with District Officials, Focus Group Discussion with male Community Elders, Direct Observations, Social Mapping and Clustering of Households, and Cluster-level Focus Group Discussions with Male and Female representatives from cluster households.