Strong government leadership at every level is essential to delivering sustainable, equitable and safely managed sanitation services at scale. Making sanitation and hygiene a political priority, and ensuring the necessary human and financial resources are available to realise these ambitions is critical.
However, this is currently a challenge in many countries. To build the local and national capacity and systems needed for area-wide S&H programming, stakeholder alignment across the S&H sector and other connected sectors is needed.
There have been pockets of success where strong and successful national, city and sub-national government leadership and prioritisation of sanitation has led to increases in coverage and driven progress.
The sector needs to review experience and identify the levers and blockages of success, including assessing the roles and responsibilities of national and local governments, development partners, the private sector and communities.
Find out about SLH work on local government leadership hoping to address some of these challenges
