I Am Consumer:
An Exploration of the Sanitation Marketing Approach in the Sanitation Sector
There is a special group of people in this world who care where people deposit their shit. Shit in this case is not a swearword, but the technical term used by development specialists who work in water and sanitation. For decades, multilateral organizations such as UNICEF, The World Bank, USAID, and various nonprofits have tried to figure out how adequate sanitation can be adopted and implemented in the developing world. Currently, 2.4 billion people in the world lack adequate sanitation (UN 2003), which could mean no sanitation mechanism at all or current sanitation systems in place are not sufficient to handle human waste. This statistic is particularly troubling as water-related diseases cause 80% of sickness and death in the developing world (UN 2003), due most often to contaminated water sources. One need look no further than the recent outbreaks of cholera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Haiti to see how improper disposal of human waste can lead to public health crises.
When water and sanitation first became a priority in international development, development organizations did not take into account consumer demand for sanitation services. In fact, villagers were not looked at as consumers of products, but rather beneficiaries of technology. Thus, the building of latrines by aid agencies failed to reduce open defecation and increase latrine usage significantly because of the lack of consultation with local people about preferences and motivations, the non-ownership of the latrines by the local people, and the lack of knowledge and access to materials to repair broken latrines. After decades of failed approaches that did not involve the participation of the aid recipients, the current millennium has latched on to the idea of participatory approach, and more specifically the idea of treating aid recipients as consumers that are a part of adopting the appropriate sanitation for them.
Approximately 500 million households require improved sanitation worldwide in order to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for sanitation by 2015 (Tobias and Israel 2010), thus making the need to find out what sanitation approach will work to ameliorate this situation, urgent. This research will study the impact that treating aid recipients as consumers has on the increased adoption of adequate sanitation through the approach of sanitation marketing. The focus of the study will be how sanitation marketing influences the decision by the poor in developing countries—particularly rural area dwellers—to purchase latrines, while additionally looking at the role subsidies can play in facilitating the availability of the hardware necessary to address their sanitation needs. This study will help to consolidate important research done on sanitation marketing to the poor in order to gather further support for sanitation marketing and appropriate subsidy targeting as potential solutions to meeting the sanitation MDG by 2015.
Throughout current literature on sanitation marketing one of the main concerns has been that the poor can still struggle with the lack of funds to purchase sanitation systems. While this is certainly a reality, sanitation marketing can be used as a tool to generate the demand within communities and because that can lead to the development of more small-scale providers of sanitation services, the poor can step into this niche market with the use of subsidies to encourage sanitation business ventures. Furthermore, the growth of this market can provide more affordable options for sanitation than non market-based approaches, thus helping the poor to have more access to improved sanitation services.
The type of data I will be using to support my claims include field observations/reports from aid agencies—particularly The World Bank, USAID and UNICEF—, including evaluations of programs or strategies related to the water and sanitation sector by certain nonprofits. The analysis done in this field is quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative in the sense that data is collected to find out about sanitation coverage and costs of varying sanitation technologies—most often this data is also represented in graphs; qualitative because people are interviewed to find out about their preferences and attitudes toward sanitation. Essentially, this thesis will be based on a literature view of these various types of sources.
In terms of the limitations of this study, many of the sources that will be used contain country case studies. As each country is unique, and even within a country urban and rural approaches to problems vary, this study can only speak to particular data found in those countries and hopefully apply some outcomes to the sanitation situation at-large. For purposes of making the data pool more precise, the focus of this paper is on sanitation marketing in rural areas and not urban, though where appropriate, research findings from urban area studies may be applied.
At the core of this research endeavor is the desire to further validate the approaches of sanitation marketing and targeted subsidies so that discussions can begin to take place around the issue of scalability, which is especially relevant when looking at how these methods can be used to push countries with inadequate sanitation further toward the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation by 2015.
To read the full thesis, click Oti-Thesis.
References:
Cairncross, Sandy. 2004. The case for marketing sanitation. Water and Sanitation Program- Africa. World Bank.
Curtis, Val and Jenkins, Marion W. 2005. Achieving the ‘good life’: Why some people want latrines in rural Benin. Social Science & Medicine, 61: 2446-2459.
Jenkins, Marion W. and Scott, Beth. 2007. Behavioral Indicators of Household Decision-Making and Demand for Sanitation and Potential Gains from Sanitation Marketing in Ghana. Social Science & Medicine, 64: 2427–2442
The World Bank. 2005. Harnessing Market Power for Rural Sanitation. Water and Sanitation Program-East Asia and the Pacific.
The World Bank. 2004. Who Buys Latrines, When and Why?. Water and Sanitation Program-Africa.
Tobias, Scott and Israel, Morris. 2010. Experiences and Lessons Learned in Sanitation Marketing Programs – 2008 to 2010. Webinar. USAID.
