Understanding new demand for home sanitation in rural Benin

The battle to meet the Millennium Development Goal target to halve the proportion of people without access to sanitation is being lost. Traditional approaches that rely on subsidised latrine construction and health education programmes have generally failed. Supporting the private sector to supply household sanitation and using marketing to promote new demand could accelerate progress.

A field study from the Water and Sanitation Programme - Africa (WSP-AF) cites evidence from the West African state of Benin to put forward the case that sanitation provision should build on the market’s ability to respond to consumer demand. WSP-AF argues that households must want improved sanitation to make and sustain changes in their behaviour. It is therefore vital to understand what generates demand and explore how to encourage it.

A marketing approach recognises that households seeking to solve their sanitation problems are consumers who make their own decisions about how they spend their money and where they defecate. It acknowledges that latrine adoption is rarely motivated by messages about health benefits alone. More important are the immediate benefits of increased convenience, comfort, cleanliness, privacy, safety and the prestige offered by home sanitation.

Research in central Benin sought to find out why some rural households decided to change from defecating in the open – the traditional practice – and install a pit latrine at home, while others had not. At the time of the study, only seven percent of rural households had installed some kind of pit latrine.

Researchers found that:

• Villages with greater demand were clustered around urban centres and along main roads, where open defecation sites were increasingly considered unattractive and distant.
• Information about latrines was spreading to new households in rural areas whose members had encountered latrines in urban homes.
• Owning a latrine provided many benefits to the owner and his/her family, enabling them to display their connections with the urban world and modern views, leave a legacy for their children, avoid the dangers of defecating at night (including crime and supernatural spirits) and avoid the smell and sight of faeces, among others.
• Hardly any informants mentioned typical health benefits of sanitation, like preventing faecal-oral transmission of diseases, as a motivation.
• Households faced important obstacles to installing a latrine, including difficulty saving, lack of awareness, technical complexity and perceived poor performance.

Without intervention, home sanitation is likely to continue to spread relatively slowly and selectively by word-of-mouth to those rural households who have contact with adopters. Female-headed households valued latrines more but were less able to access technical knowledge to build a pit latrine. New demand for sanitation should be created by:

• ensuring that promotional messages reflect consumers’ felt needs for improved sanitation
• advertising and information campaigns – using mass media, traditional channels and mobile toilet exhibits – to provide simple-to-understand information about different types of latrines, how they work and what they cost
• initially concentrating on larger on-road villages and targeting larger, non-farm households with stronger urban ties and more income
• establishing a system of payment by instalment and breaking down construction into incremental steps.

Source(s):
‘Who buys latrines, where and why?’, The Water and Sanitation Program, by Marion Jenkins, September 2004 Full document.

Funded by: World Bank

id21 Research Highlight: 15 June 2005

Further Information:
Water and Sanitation Programme - Africa
World Bank
Hill Park Building
Upper Hill Road
PO Box 30577
Nairobi, Kenya

Tel: +254 20 322-6306
Fax: +254 20 322-6386
Contact the contributor: wspaf@worldbank.org

Water and Sanitation Program-Africa

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Patronage, politics and toilets

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The challenges of financing sanitation