Evidence on designing sanitation interventions

Abstract

Sanitation is a public good, the responsibility for which is shared between households and the government. Interventions in the sector, therefore, must be designed with an eye toward reducing crowd out. We discuss the new findings on sanitation provision from the 12 papers in this special issue in the context of a simple model of household choice of levels of sanitation investment in the face of joint responsibility between the government and households over sanitation. The model provides micro-foundations for understanding when we should be particularly concerned about the potential for crowd-out together with intuition for the implications of the choice of intervention design between information, in-kind transfers, cash transfers, and subsidies. We use the framework of the model to discuss the findings of the papers in this special issue.