Sanitation Marketing for Five Cambodia Provinces: A Joint IDE, Lien Aid, & WTO Project in Cambodia

Latrine-building projects have been a popular form of development assistance for decades. These types of projects act as “hardware subsidies”, where the desired sanitation technology is installed by the Government or large NGO relatively free of charge to the recipients, often lacking any form of outreach or community engagement, with the belief that, “if you build it, they will come”. But do these types of programs actually work? Abundant evidence exists for hardware subsidy projects that fail in the long-term, due to no personal motivation or ‘ownership’ of the recipients for the facility. Too often, follow-up studies to these types of projects find the latrine having fallen into disuse, due perhaps to lack of understanding of proper maintenance procedures or lack of desire by the recipients to use it. Recognizing this, development agencies are coming to the realization that alternative approaches to promoting proper sanitation are needed. These include the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) movement, which focuses on educating people –especially communities practicing open defecation – about the real risks their unsanitary practices pose to them and essentially ‘shaming’ them about it enough to inspire in them the motivation to go out and build or purchase their own improved sanitation facility. Most recently, a group of development NGOs in Cambodia decided to implement a different, market-focused, approach, which they have termed ‘sanitation marketing’. The idea of the approach is to bring together three elements deemed crucial to sparking a demand for improved sanitation products in low-income people who would otherwise have little interest in them: 1) appropriate designs for low-cost latrines, 2) the provision of business training to interested local sanitation entrepreneurs, and 3) the effective marketing in the community of sanitation as a desirable purchase priority. With low-cost latrine designs that meet the needs, wants, and desires of the consumer, with properly trained and equipped local businesses to sell this design and make money, and with a populace motivated by effective marketing to value a latrine as an important purchase, a sanitation program can expand and spread like wildfire with very little NGO intervention and no hardware subsidies. Soon more businesses are starting up, seeing the profit to be had, and are offering new designs and new marketing slogans to attract even more customers, which, in turn, attract even more customers as residents grow envious of their neighbor’s attractive new latrine. Determined to demonstrate the effectiveness of this idea on the ground, USAID and the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank (WSP) funded International Development Enterprises (IDE), Lien Aid, and the World Toilet Organization (WTO) – three large development NGOs – to collaborate and develop this sanitation marketing program in rural Cambodian provinces, by working to bring together the “design”, the “training”, and the “marketing”.

This teaching case is available here.

Published by Sustainable Sanitation Alliance.