Open Defecation Free (ODF) Nepal: How Nepal Built Millions of Toilets

Open Defecation Free (ODF) is a status a community, ward, local level or district earns when every household has and uses a toilet, so that nobody defecates in the open. In Nepal the standard was tightened over time to require that all households have access to an improved toilet, that institutions such as schools and health posts have toilets, and that hand-washing and hygiene behaviour are practised. ODF is therefore a behaviour-change goal, not merely a construction target.

On 30 September 2019 (14 Ashwin 2076 BS), and formally marked on 1 October 2019, the Government of Nepal declared the entire country Open Defecation Free after all 753 local levels and all 77 districts had been individually verified as ODF. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli made the national announcement in Kathmandu. With this declaration Nepal became the first country in South Asia to be officially recognised as ODF, an achievement widely cited in answer to the common search query 'nepal open defecation free year'.

The declaration was the culmination of roughly eight years of intensive campaigning under a national master plan, and around sixteen years since the community-led approach first arrived in Nepal. It represented a dramatic reversal for a country where, at the start of the 2000s, fewer than a third of households had a toilet.

Nepal's sanitation movement grew out of Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), an approach introduced to the country around 2003. Instead of subsidising toilets from the top down, CLTS uses community 'triggering' to make people confront the health consequences of open defecation and collectively decide to end it. The first village to be declared ODF in Nepal was Ghachok in Kaski district in 2007, and Kaski became the first district declared ODF in 2011.

These early successes showed that whole communities could become ODF quickly when local ownership was strong. But progress was uneven and depended heavily on individual projects and NGOs. To scale the effort into a genuinely national campaign, the government needed a single, unifying framework that all districts, ministries and development partners could follow.

That framework arrived in 2011 with the Sanitation and Hygiene Master Plan, which turned scattered local victories into a coordinated national mission with a clear target date and a shared definition of success.

The Sanitation and Hygiene Master Plan (SHMP) was endorsed in 2011 by the then Ministry of Physical Planning and Works / Ministry of Water Supply, and is the single most important policy document behind Nepal's ODF success. It set the national goal of universal sanitation coverage and a Total Behaviour Change, aiming to declare the whole country ODF by 2017 (later extended to 2019). The plan is frequently searched under the term 'sanitation master plan nepal'.

Crucially, the Master Plan discouraged hardware subsidies for individual household toilets and instead emphasised community mobilisation, local government leadership and the creation of self-propelled ODF movements. It promoted tools such as reward and recognition for ODF-declared areas, community revolving funds, and targeted support so that poor, Dalit, disadvantaged and marginalised households could also build toilets and reach ODF status.

The Master Plan also standardised the institutional machinery of the campaign. It defined coordination committees at every tier of government and made local bodies, rather than central ministries, the primary drivers of change. This decentralised design is what allowed the campaign to move district by district across very different geographies.

The Master Plan built the campaign around a nested structure of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Coordination Committees (WASH-CCs). At the top sat the National Sanitation and Hygiene Coordination Committee (NSHCC), with Regional WASH-CCs (R-WASH-CCs) providing monitoring and follow-up beneath it. The engine room of the campaign, however, was at the local level.

The District Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Coordination Committee (D-WASH-CC) coordinated the ODF drive in each district. D-WASH-CCs pulled together the District Development Committee, line agencies, NGOs and development partners to prepare a single joint plan of action, pool resources and share costs, avoiding the duplication that had slowed earlier efforts. Many districts also set up a District Sanitation Desk to strengthen day-to-day coordination among these actors.

Below the district, Village Development Committee-level (V-WASH-CC) and Municipal-level (M-WASH-CC) committees ran triggering, monitoring and verification on the ground. Because each district could only be declared ODF once every ward within it qualified, the campaign advanced as a visible, competitive cascade: villages, then local levels, then whole districts declaring ODF one after another until the final national declaration in 2019.

The scale of the turnaround is what makes the ODF story remarkable. Nepal's sanitation coverage rose from around 27% in 2000 to about 43% by 2010, and then accelerated sharply after the Master Plan took effect, reaching more than 95% by the 2019 declaration. According to Ministry of Water Supply statistics cited at the time of the declaration, at least one toilet had been built in over 5.6 million households across the country.

The hardest region was the Terai-Madhesh in the southern plains, where landlessness, poverty, high water tables and cultural factors kept toilet ownership low. In eight of the most difficult Terai districts, coverage was lifted from roughly 13% to around 98% in little more than four years through concentrated campaigning by government and partners such as SNV and UN-Habitat. These Terai districts were the last to be declared ODF before the national announcement.

The achievement was celebrated as a genuine public-health win: eliminating open defecation is strongly linked to reductions in diarrhoeal disease, child stunting and other faecal-oral illnesses. At the same time, journalists and researchers documented that some declared areas still had households without functioning toilets, a reminder that a declaration marks a stage in a process rather than a permanent end-state.

Reaching ODF status confirmed that Nepalis had access to toilets, but access is only the first rung of the sanitation ladder. The global standard for 2030 is 'safely managed sanitation', which additionally requires that the waste be safely contained, emptied, transported, treated and disposed of. On this measure Nepal still has a long way to go: estimates suggest only around a fifth of the population is served by safely managed sanitation.

Because the great majority of Nepali toilets are on-site (pit latrines and septic tanks) rather than connected to sewers, the country now faces a large faecal sludge management (FSM) challenge. Most of the population relies on non-sewered, on-site systems, while only a small share is connected to sewer networks, and the sludge that accumulates must eventually be emptied and treated. Only a handful of faecal sludge treatment plants had been established by the early 2020s, and their operational performance is not fully documented.

For students and Loksewa/GK aspirants, the key point is that Nepal's 2019 ODF declaration was a landmark first step, not the finish line. The national sanitation agenda has since shifted from building toilets to ensuring the whole 'sanitation chain' is safe, alongside sustaining ODF status where toilets fall into disrepair or were never fully built.