Can social marketing increase demand and uptake of sanitation?

Despite the gains made in increasing sanitation coverage during the United Nations water and sanitation decade of 1981 - 1990, over 2.4 billion people still do not have access to improved sanitation. Why is the uptake of sanitation low? Is a new approach to promoting sanitation needed?

Research from WEDC, UK, in conjunction with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, TREND Group, Kumasi and WaterAid Tanzania considers the use of social marketing to increase demand and uptake of improved sanitation. The research is taking place in Nkawie, a small town in the Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Among other research methods, in-depth interviews were used to understand the factors that motivate or constrain households from installing household latrines and the attributes that people desire in latrines. The private sector, in the form of local informal latrine providers including diggers, masons and carpenters, was also interviewed to investigate its role in latrine provision and its perspective on the demand and uptake of latrines.

The findings so far suggest that the reason for the low uptake of household sanitation facilities is that sanitation programmes do not sufficiently understand users and what they want before starting projects. It is time for latrine programmes to treat users as consumers who have a say in what products they buy to meet their needs rather than as beneficiaries who receive gifts.

Key findings of the research include:

• Uptake of latrines could increase if they were designed to provide more of the attributes that people want such as no smell and good ventilation, cheap to install, less dependent on water, easy access for desludging (emptying), safe for children and the opportunity to sit while using it.
• Since consumers are not currently motivated to build improved sanitation facilities in order to avoid faecal-oral transmission, conventional sanitation promotion efforts focusing on better health are unlikely to have an impact on uptake.
• Cost is not the only barrier to buying a latrine; other important factors are operation and maintenance, space, lack of awareness, lack of credit facilities and government legislation such as building permits.
• Informal private sector latrine providers can respond to changes in users' demand in innovative ways, such as modifying the method of installing vent pipes in ventilated improved pit latrines to enable easy access for desludging. However, in many cases they lack the necessary technical, financial and business-planning capacity.

The research will also develop and test marketing strategies for household latrines including communication and latrine delivery strategies. This will provide the basis for drafting a guideline for social marketing of sanitation.

The policy recommendations so far include:

• improving access to credit and allocation of subsidies to increase the uptake of improved sanitation facilities, especially among poor households
• allowing flexibility in developing latrine technologies to respond to people's needs rather than the standardised technologies supported by policy
• investing in the study of users' behaviour and preferences and the design of latrines and sanitation services that better meet these demands
• encouraging support from the public sector and non-governmental organisations to provide training and capacity building for the informal private sector providers
• creating more flexible sanitation policies that allow for adaptation to local conditions and to the needs of local government and users.

Amaka Obika, Marion Jenkins, Guy Howard and Valerie Curtis

Contact
Amaka Obika
WEDC
Loughborough University
Leicestershire LE11 3TU
UK

T +44 (0) 1509 222885
F +44 (0) 1509 211079
e.u.obika@lboro.ac.uk
www.lboro.ac.uk/wedc/

See also

'Social marketing for urban sanitation: review of evidence and inception report', WEDC, Loughborough University, UK
www.lboro.ac.uk/wedc/projects/sm

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