Community led total sanitation in a nomadic community of Sajiloni Location, Kajiado County

Abstract

Introduction: Community Led Total Sanitation is an innovative approach that focuses on behaviour change. It creates awareness on the dangers posed by poor hygiene practices such as open defeacation, poor personal and environmental hygiene and unsafe water usage. Kenya is implementing this approach in 27 sub-counties that have low sanitation standards. Objective: To assess the adoption of Community Led Total Sanitation approach in a nomadic community of Sajiloni Location. Specific objectives: 1. To determine latrine coverage in Sajiloni location. 2. To assess household hygiene practices in Sajiloni location. 3. To assess household accessibility to safe water in Sajiloni location. Methodology: A descriptive cross-sectional study design was adopted. Sajiloni location was divided into nine strata‟s. Each stratum represented the existing nine villages. The first head of household to be interviewed was picked at random from the household registers provided by the village headmen. Subsequent persons‟ interviewed were picked after every 4th person in the household register. This was done until 345 heads of households were interviewed. A structured and pre-tested questionnaire complemented with an observation checklist was used to collect data. Data collected was sorted and coded using Epi Info version 3.1. Then after SPSS version 17 was used for analysis. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze data for both continuous and categorical data. This was done by use of measures of central tendency, frequencies and percentages. Chi square test was then used to determine an association between dependent variables and independent variables with level of significance set at α=0.05. Results: Majority (65.8%) of the respondents were female. Slightly above half (59%) of the households reported a monthly expenditure of between Ksh. 5000- Ksh. 10000. A higher percentage (49.1%) had no formal education. Adoption of CLTS based on latrine coverage was low at 46.2%; of the latrines available 61% needed reconstruction. A small percentage (47.6%) had a hand washing facility next to the latrine and of that only 41.8% had water inside the leaky tin. Adoption of CLTS based on household hygiene practice found that only 14% heads of households washed their hands with water and a detergent after using latrines and/or after handling children‟s feaces. Open defeacation sites were present in over half (51.9%) of the households. A higher percentage (71%) of households had litter strewn all over their compounds. Only 20.3% of households had dish racks and of those that provided the racks 21.4% were not in satisfactory condition. CLTS adoption measured by access to safe water found that most (77.7%) households used water from unprotected shallow wells with 68.1% being less than 2kms away from their water source. The findings further reveal that (91.2%) of the households reported that their daily domestic water consumption was not sufficient. The study reveals that most households were not accessible to water points; with a majority (88%) of the households drawing water from un-protected sources. Most (88.3%) households treat water at home before drinking with 82.6% using chlorine tablets. Conclusion and recommendation: According to WHO (2010) universal access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation is a basic human right. However, this study shows that CLTS approach has not registered reasonable gains in helping households in Sajiloni location increase latrine coverage and adopt good hygiene practices but it has improved on safe water use at household level. This study therefore, recommends hygiene education to be taught at all levels of education in an effort to improve CLTS adoption in line with WHO recommendations.