A condensed manual for successful latrine building in rural areas using the latest developments of the SanPlat system.

Getting started the right way helps to get a successful sanitation project underway. This text gives detailed advice on one way of making it. With some experience, this way can be modified and improved to fit the specific conditions you will meet in areas so that you will learn better and better.

For your next field trip:

A condensed manual for successful latrine building in rural areas using the latest developments of the SanPlat system.

Next time you go on a field trip you can build a demonstration latrine and start up a successful latrine building programme in the same day.

All you need is a box of the new "all in one SanPlat Moulds", a bag of cement and this manual.

Each bag of cement will give you up to ten SanPlats. If you have never used cement before, don't worry, the manual is easy enough to be to fit on one page (see end of this booklet). The method has been developed for people with no experience at all of cement works.

The SanPlat can be installed in any existing latrine. You simply put the SanPlat on some wet mud laid out around the drop hole of the existing latrine and the SanPlat Latrine is ready to use. Remember that the SanPlat is fragile for a few days. It takes a week to become strong and a month to get it's full strength. But if you install it on top of a latrine floor there should be nothing to worry about.

Private latrines can have a tight fitting lid. No smell and no flies. The lid is easily made using the hole of a SanPlat as a mould.

Leave the moulds with the village leadership who could be in charge of the programme. Ask somebody to bring more cement, some 6 mm re-bars and a pint (half a litre, best diluted with 50% diesel oil) of normal motor oil for greasing the moulds and you have a latrine building programme underway. The people will love the new SanPlats and build latrines as never before.

Using proper SanPlat moulds a SanPlat makes the whole latrine a prestigious family asset.

Does this sound too simple?

If you want to have 100% coverage and guaranteed health improvements, you need promotion and hygiene education to go along with the installation of the SanPlats. And of course you need a safe water supply. The villagers will remind you about that; and water can also be used as a tool for community mobilisation.

If you have water supply in your programme, tie it together, hard, with the construction and use of latrines. Safe water, latrines and hygiene education should be planned together. If you leave one of the three out health will not improve.

The motor is promotion. People who run programmes are motivated by providing health. Families are motivated by comfort, privacy and pride in their homes; by being modern. The first group to take up your idea will be those who already have built a latrine, and those are normally the influential people in the community.

It there is the possibility of acquiring a SanPlat they will rapidly be followed by those who were thinking of building a latrine and like to follow the advise and example of the influential ones.

In this way you may reach 70% of the families, enough to put peer pressure on the remaining 30% so that you can reach the goal of 100%.

Health for all! All for health!

Four Steps for Village Meetings:

• How to engage villages in a latrine building programme.
• Test it and make your own improvements.
• When the programme gets well know, you may simplify it further.

Preparation (Before Starting):

• Remember that you are assisting the village and that you need to understand how you best can assist it. The responsibility is primarily theirs. They will want your help.
  • Listening and seeing is the best way to start. Let the villagers pull your secrets out of you. That is the best way to make them listen, see and underst

  • Remember that you represent an organisation, willing to assist but only under certain conditions.

Step One - The First Visit:

• Meet with the village leadership, health committee, women's group and youth representatives.
• Discuss how the new latrines could improve hygiene and health in the village, but also privacy, convenience and individual prestige.
• Explain that your organisation has limited resources and many villages to assist and that priority has to be given to the villages that have the best contribution and progress.
• Agree when to meet next time and what to do then.

Step Two - The Second Visit:

• Make a walk in the village and look for examples of good and bad sanitation
  • Find out how and where people defecate
  • Look at existing latrines and see how they can be improved.
  • Find out when and how people wash their hands.
• Divide into 4 groups: men women, youth and elder people. Discuss what you have seen in the groups. Each group should
  • Make a summary of what they have seen identifying main needs, problems and possibilities
  • Make a proposal for action.
• Discuss the proposals and sort out which proposals are related to promotion of latrine building and better hygiene.
• Discuss what the village can do by itself and what support your organisation may provide.
• Agree to discuss their findings revised proposal and actual progress next time you visit the village.

Step Three - The Third Visit:

• Repeat the same procedure and discuss the importance of the good example of the village leadership and other influential people in the village.
• Monitor actual progress and discuss it with the village management.

Four - The Fourth Visit:

• Repeat the same procedure and focus the discussion on the importance of all villagers using latrines.
• Monitor actual progress and discuss it with the village management.

With your assistance the village can now do the job.

Good luck!