The roles and processes of government and other external agencies are key to motivating communities to track progress for their own needs, as well as for organisational learning and accountability.
Monitoring, verification and certification are critical elements of the community-led total sanitation (CLTS) process and contribute to ensuring sustainability of open defecation free (ODF) status, as well as learning about changes that are needed to improve implementation. Monitoring includes both process and progress monitoring.
Verification tends to be led by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or government, with clear criteria and methodologies being developed, often incorporating multiple assessment visits over an extended period of time. Certification and celebration of ODF communities acknowledges their achievement and helps to raise awareness in the surrounding areas.
The adoption of CLTS as a national approach in many countries has resulted in national protocols and guidance documents as well as various methodologies for community engagement and data collection to aid the processes of monitoring, verification and certification. Increasingly, the importance of post-ODF monitoring is being recognised. We need to know more about how to incorporate this into implementation to ensure longer-term sustainability of behaviour change and of toilets.
Similarly, there are challenges around effective collection, management and utilisation of data. Other emerging issues relate to: reliability and accuracy of monitoring and verification; encouraging appropriate attitudes to encourage learning rather than fault-finding; and how to incentivise staff involved in monitoring and verification.
We also need to know more about monitoring for long-term sustainability of behaviour change and inclusion. Many of these issues are being investigated through local, national and international learning processes.
