Towards Incorporating Rural Sanitation Issues into the Rural Development Agenda

Globally about 2.5 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation and 1.1 billion practice open defecation. Open defecation symbolises an embedded form of marginalisation especially in remote rural villages where latrines are often restricted to village elites. Likewise, rural sanitation is closely linked to global inequalities in which rural poor sanitation reflects multiple levels of inequality. Similarly, rural systems of sanitations are interlinked with fragile rural livelihoods. The paper utilizes social exclusion to frame and highlight that rural sanitation issues are critical elements of rural development. Consequently, the paper draws our attention to how sanitation improvements should be viewed as part of wider processes of social and political change. Typically, the objective in this paper is to unpack the specific conditions that impact on sanitation exclusion and highlight implications for systemic policy interventions that can sustain improvements inrural sanitation systems in developing world especially in Asia and Africa. The paper enhances the contribution of critical sanitation scholarship to policy development and sustained rural sanitation improvements.