Behavioural Indicators of Household Decision-Making and Demand for Sanitation and Potential Gains from Sanitation Marketing in Ghana

This 26-page report documents a survey conducted in Ghana to assess demand and decision-making around sanitation and identify strategies for sanitation marketing. The authors compare motivating and constraining factors at each stage of adoption of sanitation practices and discuss strategies likely to increase toilet installation in Ghana. According to the report, recognising where and how marketing can affect household sanitation decisions is the first of several challenges for sanitation managers wanting to use marketing approaches to increase demand for and access to improved sanitation. This study uses a model of household sanitation adoption decision-making that accounts for motivation, opportunity, and ability.

The study discusses strategies to increase sanitation demand based on 3 stages of adoption - preference for changing sanitation, intention to build a toilet, and making the choice to install one. To increase people's preference to change their sanitation practices, the report states that marketing campaigns should focus on the benefits of installing household toilets - convenience, safety, and cleanliness - and increase awareness of the negative aspects of current defaecation practices, specifically, their dirty and smelly state. According to the report, increasing people's intentions to build toilets is more complicated than a simple marketing campaign can address, as lack of home ownership and space and savings constraints require changes in law, public policy, and other mechanisms. Constraints to increasing final choice to build a toilet are related to: the perceived high costs of toilet options; lack of a builder; the complexity of building relative to knowledge levels; and water table and soil problems. According to the report, these constraints could be addressed by: actions to improve the quality, range, and costs of toilet; technologies offered; innovative ways and incentives to extend supply and related services; and sales promotion and product education and marketing.

The report notes that there is a need for different interventions at different stages in the adoption process, saying that programmes may choose to design a set of strategies for one adoption stage, or all of them, but that one blanket intervention is unlikely to work.