 A Community Based Program Promotes SanitationMaría Laura Alzúa, Habiba Djebbari and Amy Pickering Post-Print from HAL Abstract: Basic sanitation facilities are still lacking in large parts of the developing world, engendering serious environmental health risks. Interventions commonly deliver in-kind or cash subsidies to promote private toilet ownership. In this paper, we assess an intervention that provides information and behavioral incentives to encourage villagers in rural Mali to build and use basic latrines. Using an experimental research design and carefully measured indicators of use, we find a sizeable impact from this intervention: latrine ownership and use almost doubled in intervention villages, and open defecation (OD) was reduced by half. Our results partially attribute these effects to increased knowledge about cheap and locally available sanitation solutions. They are also associated with shifts in social norms governing sanitation. Taken together, our findings, unlike previous evidence from other contexts, suggest that a progressive approach that starts with ending OD and targets whole communities at a time can help meet the United Nations' 2015 Sustainable Development Goal of ending OD. Keywords: sanitation; behavioral change; community-based intervention; social norm (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2020, 68 (2), pp.357-390. ⟨10.1086/701214⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02078999 DOI: 10.1086/701214 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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