Today 2.5 billion people in developing countries do not have access to basic sanitation services. This has a profound effect on their health, economic, and social well-being. While a number of innovative and successful approaches have increased access to sanitation on a small scale, governments and the global community have not been able to scale-up and sustain these efforts.

To learn how to improve rural sanitation at scale and create sustainable change, WSP is working closely with local and national governments, non-governmental organizations, and the domestic private sector in more than a dozen countries where rural sanitation is a critical need (see map). And we’re capturing and sharing learning to enable evidence-based decision making by policy-makers and increase support for large-scale implementation in these countries and elsewhere.

WSP’s learning strategy focuses on four critical areas: combining Community-Led Total Sanitation and social marketing strategies, or sanitation marketing, to create sustainable behaviour change and strengthen the supply of products and services; how to strengthen the enabling environment to work at scale; how to improve performance monitoring to support evidence-based decision making by policy-makers; and how to leverage knowledge to influence policy and action.