AbstractFinite storage capacities of household pit latrines make safely managing fecal sludge a recurring challenge for 2.7 billion people globally. Frequently without guidance from standards or regulation, rural latrine owners choose how to manage their own fecal sludge. However, their intentions – what behavioral science says are the best predictors of future behaviors – when pits fill are poorly understood, inhibiting the development of safe fecal sludge management (FSM) solutions and deteriorating public and environmental health. Using survey data commonly measured by development practitioners, we analyze response frequencies and their associations with contextual factors, such as location, month that the survey was administered, and poverty level. We also use binomial logistic regression to determine if contextual factors can be used to predict the intentions of rural Cambodian latrine owners when pits fill. We found that four in ten rural latrine owners intend to manage their fecal sludge unsafely (41%), and one in six did not have a plan (16%). Desirable FSM intentions increased markedly after rice harvest and varied markedly across provinces. Many predictors of desirable FSM intentions, such as location and satisfaction with the household's latrine, were also identified. Associations between FSM intentions and contextual factors can be used to help predict FSM behaviors and improve FSM service delivery, behavior change campaigns, and product design. However, future work should seek to characterize the complete decision-making processes of rural latrine owners when pits fill.This article has been made Open Access thanks to the generous support of a global network of libraries as part of the Knowledge Unlatched Select initiative.
Continued access to sanitation and
the improvements to public health
that it provides requires safe fecal sludge management (FSM). Trained
service providers offer the best path to achieve safe FSM in rural
communities, but this service industry is hindered by a lack of understanding
household valuation of FSM services in rural Cambodia. Using a discrete
choice experiment, we characterize rural households’ preferences
for four different FSM-service attributes across five provinces. We
find that rural households prefer preventing contact with fecal sludge
(FS) most among the tested FSM-service attributes, followed by reducing
foul odor and producing fertilizer from FS. Reducing time to service
delivery was also preferred comparably to producing fertilizer from
FS when time to service delivery increased to 4 weeks. Preferences
were also analyzed by province, poverty, and education, providing
regional and demographic-specific results. Based on the study’s
results, we recommend that Cambodia’s rural sanitation sector
develop an FSM-service model that focuses on preventing human contact
with FS. Premium levels of service that reduce foul odor and/or provide
fertilizer from FS should be offered. Development practitioners should
consider the strong preference heterogeneity for FSM-service attributes
of households across and within provinces and demographics. These
recommendations will provide practical benefits to FSM safety and
ultimately improve public health.
In this paper, the authors present an innovative approach to measuring the resilience of a market system—the Market Systems Resilience Index (MSRI). The MSRI has been developed both to guide development practitioners in the process of conducting resilience assessments and to promote the inclusion of all relevant actors within a market system. A narrative review of the evolution of resilience measurement is presented including identifying the gaps and challenges that remain. Some of these include balancing comparability and contextualization of the questions, understanding how often to perform the survey, and determining how many market actors are needed to properly assess the resilience of the market. This is followed by outlining the development of the MSRI and how it fills some of the existing gaps including the addition of households into the market analysis while creating a set of questions that are consistent while allowing for some optional questions to add nuance. Examples from Nepal and Bangladesh are used to highlight the types of findings that come from using the MSRI. Finally, we describe how these results may be used to inform and guide program management and design of projects.
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