SIERRA LEONE‘S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE

# Water supply and sanitation

## **Achievements**

Sierra Leone established a National Water and Sanitation Policy in September 2008 to improve the provision of water supply and sanitation. As part of this policy, the sector has seen increasing decentralization of service. The country is undertaking a new, five-year water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) program to improve water and sanitation coverage nationwide. As part of WASH, the country is developing a successful community-led sanitation program, which has led to 169 communities being certified as open-defecation free and approximately 24,000 people living in open-defecation-free environments, among other results (box 2).

## **Box 2. Communities Leading the Way to Improved Sanitation in Sierra Leone**

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approaches are bringing improved sanitation to whole communities and mobilizing sanitation actors to work within a coordinated national strategy. In line with Sierra Leone‘s transition from supply-driven relief to longer-term development planning, these programs are augmenting local capacity while helping to strengthen communities torn apart by conflict.

CLTS is one of the methods Sierra Leone is using to rapidly increase sustainable sanitation coverage nationwide. The goal of CLTS programming is the community-wide elimination of open defecation through awareness-raising and affordable sanitation options. The role of outsiders is to guide the community to assess its sanitation situation, determine a strategy for improvement, implement the solution and develop a way to measure success.

In Sierra Leone, CLTS began as a successful pilot exercise with 28 villages at the beginning of 2008, and later was incorporated into each district‘s three-year rolling health plan. Implementation of CLTS rapidly accelerated in the second half of 2008 and into 2009 with NGOs and district health management teams working side by side to trigger communities throughout the country. As of June 2009, 754 communities adopted CLTS approaches, 169 communities were certified as open-defecation free, approximately 24,000 people lived in open-defecation-free environments, and CLTS was accepted by the majority of stakeholders as a viable sanitation strategy.

Over the next five years, Sierra Leone plans to scale up community-led sanitation across the country through continued community training, sanitation and hygiene marketing, strengthening of supply chains, public-private partnerships, monitoring and evaluation, and impact assessment. One of the major challenges is to change the culture of dependency fostered by subsidy- and construction-driven sanitation programs that hinder communities from taking the responsibility and leadership in designing, developing and implementing steps to improve their own community‘s sanitation profile. Also, as the program has been more successful in rural areas where population density is low than in urban settings, a master plan for urban sanitation needs to be developed.

_Source_ : Adapted from UNICEF (2009).

## **Challenges**

Access to improved water and sanitation has declined steadily since 2000. Access to the safest forms of water supply and sanitation has deteriorated over time, worsening the living conditions of the Sierra Leoneans (table 9). Between 2000 and 2006 access to piped water decreased whereas access to wells and boreholes increased. In the same period, an important percentage of the population was moving away from septic tanks and improved latrines to traditional latrines.<sup>6</sup> On average, between 2000 and 2008 two percent of the population per year was getting access to wells and boreholes, while around 3 percent of

> 6 Traditional latrines include shared latrines. Lack of sanitary facilities and poor hygiene are major contributors to Sierra Leone‘s exceptionally high under-five mortality rate (267 per 1,000 live births), the highest in the world. Maternal and infant mortality are also among the highest—and in many cases are likewise attributable to poor sanitation and hygiene.

31