In Koungheul, leadership and popular participation lead to cleaner streets, better health

Public sanitation has been an intractable problem in Senegal for years. In many communities, litter is scattered everywhere. Small piles of rubbish accumulate in front of homes and emit sharp, black smoke as residents attempt to incinerate them. A widespread lack of plumbing means that wastewater -- from the washing of dishes or laundry -- is dumped nearby, creating wet breeding grounds for insects and bacteria. Rain gutters running along main roads frequently harbor a noxious mix of refuse and, in the rainy season, standing water. Marketplaces pose a particular sanitation challenge, given their high concentration of people, restaurants, meat and vegetable vendors, livestock, product packaging and plastic bags.

Many of the 16,000 citizens of the central Senegalese town of Koungheul have long been troubled by such conditions. Forty-year-old Khady Top, who has sold kola nuts and other small products in the local market for over 20 years, expressed her frustration with the unsanitary conditions both in the marketplace and at home prior to recent assistance from USAID's decentralization and local governance program (DGL Felo).

"The market has always been very dirty," she said. "We vendors tried to keep our area clean, but the [nearby] gutter always smelled from the refuse, and there was nowhere to put our trash. At home, I used to burn our garbage, or pay someone to take it away from time to time. The children were sick a lot, and every rainy season, half of them would get malaria." Khady's experience was common in Koungheul. In early 2003, the town had no formal sanitation system, nor even a designated community garbage dump, so waste disposal was a haphazard, individual affair.

Despite about community sanitation, numerous past efforts to effect change in Koungheul were thwarted by a lack of coordination, communication, and leadership. Deficient public revenues led the municipality to appeal to aid organizations for donations of the sophisticated sanitation equipment they thought the job required; but even with a modern garbage truck in hand, the local leadership was unable to coordinate the public participation, labor and maintenance to institute a sustainable system. Neighborhood health committees were established to handle the problem at one point, but without authority and a clear mandate, they too foundered. The local youth group carried out periodic clean-up days, but within a few weeks, the relentless litter would reappear. Meanwhile, individual households or groups of citizens created informal dumping grounds wherever convenient. There was no effective collaboration among actors, and no one was satisfied.

By mid-2003, however, the combination of a new local administration and a timely package of assistance from USAID's decentralization and local governance program was beginning to have a positive impact on the sanitation situation in Koungheul. USAID was working with the Koungheul collectivity to build capacity in the area of local governance when public concern over sanitation issues rose to the fore as a governance priority.

In response, USAID collaborated with the local leadership to organize a series of diagnostic meetings on the subject. For the first time ever, all of the actors involved in Koungheul's sanitation came together to discuss their isolated efforts, review past failures, identify key needs and obstacles, and exchange ideas for solutions. Elected officials, neighborhood chiefs, educators, doctors, market vendors, representatives of youth and women's groups, and common citizens worked with sanitation experts brought in by USAID to develop and vote on a detailed plan of action for a realistic, sustainable sanitation system in Koungheul.

The first phase of the community's resulting "Clean Town of Koungheul" initiative focused on practical steps that would have an immediate impact. The municipality allocated land at an accessible distance from the town center for use as an official landfill site, and contracted with neighborhood sanitation committees to regularly pick up household waste and transport it to the site. USAID helped enclose the site and plant a perimeter of trees to hide it from public view. USAID also contributed six donkey-drawn carts for household waste collection and 115 public trash barrels for use in the market area. Each household, in turn, agreed to contribute 500 FCFA (just under $1) per month for the collection service, and to follow certain procedures for proper litter and waste disposal.

In addition to these basic steps, Koungheul created a community-wide sanitation management structure to assure the sustainability of its long-term plan. The new management system bestows new, clearly defined responsibilities on groups of actors such as the defunct health committees; expands the periodic clean-up program to involve women's groups, neighborhood chiefs and the health committees in addition to the youth group; and establishes a system of communication and monitoring that includes all of the actors in community sanitation. Assistance provided by USAID since 2001 has enabled the municipality to engage the public in a democratic community budget process, which will help mobilize revenues needed for the maintenance of sanitation equipment, as well as larger infrastructure investments down the road.

With USAID's support, the community launched the "Clean Town of Koungheul" initiative with a special four-day event in July 2003. The event began with a conference on public sanitation and culminated with a community-wide clean-up. Representatives from nine different collectivities around Senegal convened at the conference in Koungheul to learn about the town's new initiative and exchange their own sanitation challenges and solutions. The event thus served not only to raise awareness and public commitment to the initiative in Koungheul, but also to stimulate similar practical, democratic steps to improve public sanitation in other communities.

According to municipal officials and citizens, one of the most important results of Koungheul's efforts has been the emergence of a sense of shared responsibility for the community's sanitation. People don't litter as profusely; many households have begun bagging their garbage; people cover their used water puddles with sand; more and more households are paying the monthly garbage collection fee and report a willingness to continue paying for the service. Although citizens acknowledge that the system isn't perfect yet, their former sense of impotence has been replaced with active participation and resourcefulness in creating viable solutions. Further, Koungheul's local elected officials are proving themselves capable of effecting more successful change in the community now that they have the population's substantive input and support.

The improved sanitation of Koungheul also had a positive effect on community health during the 2003 rainy season.

"I am so much happier now that the market is cleaner," Khady Top explained. "The workmen keep the gutters clean, and we all use the trash barrels. We see a difference at home, too. The children haven't been sick as often, and when they are, it doesn't last as long. Only one out of our four children got malaria this rainy season."

The president of a local women's group underlined the impact that Koungheul's sanitation initiative is having on women in particular. Since women are traditionally responsible for maintaining a clean living environment and caring for the children, improvements in public sanitation often make their jobs easier and benefit them most.

Her statements echoed those of the chief physician in Koungheul, who said: "African tradition delegates cleanliness to women, but to make sanitation sustainable, you need the commitment and participation of the entire population and its local officials, because the triad of garbage, flies and mosquitoes is a serious obstacle to any other development." In Koungheul, the whole population is pitching in to combat that obstacle with impressive vigor.