Kamal Kar from CLTS named 84th global thinker for 2010

The magazine Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2010's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who made them. Kamal Kar, whose organisation CLTS Foundation is a SuSanA partner since 2010, got the award “for doing the world's dirty work.”

Kamal Kar spends much of his time thinking about something that many of us would rather not: where and how people poop. It's not pretty, but improving sanitation is one of the most important aspects of overcoming poverty and waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera, which kill millions of people every year. That's where Kar, an agricultural scientist by training, comes in. Sanitation is about people, not pipes, he says: "It's not a question of counting toilets." Once toilets and sewers are built, getting communities to use them is often a tougher challenge: for example in his native Bangladesh, where defecating indoors had been strictly taboo. He suggests such tactics as giving children whistles to blow whenever they see someone defecating outside -- a sort of constructive peer pressure.

And it works. After Bangladesh adopted Kar's ideas, latrine coverage skyrocketed from just 33 percent in 2003 to more than 70 percent today. Kar's "community-led total sanitation" method is now at work in 39 countries around the world.

Congratulations also from our side to this great achievement!

To view the news articles (and also the other listed people and ideas), please use the following links:
Foreign policy
Rediff

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