Sanitation Market Study

More than half of rural India continues to defecate in the open. The Indian government through its Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM) aims to eliminate open defecation by October 2019. Since inception SBM has increased the overall percentage of households with individual toilets from 41.9% in Oct 2014 to 63.7% 2 in May 2017.

The above are some extracts from: Sanitation Market Study, Challenges & Opportunities to Create High Impact Sanitation Interventions, Jan-Mar 2017.

Among other aspects of the report, the role of each actor given in the report, is interesting. It says:

Government Bodies (Enablers):

Knowledge exchanges between government bodies and the other sanitation ecosystem stakeholders can potentially help governments go beyond this limitation by understanding the key factors that prevent rural households from adopting sanitation solutions.

Sanitation Programs (Aggregators):

Sanitation programs must solve important customer pain points and thereby increase demand for
sanitation solutions. Sanitation programs also need to look at the range of interdependent problems that affects adoption of sanitation solutions. For example: if water is a problem in a particular area this needs to be addressed simultaneously with sanitation.

Financing Institutions (Supporters):

Financing institutions need to pro-actively collaborate with sanitation programs to infuse more
capital into the sanitation ecosystem.

Sanitation Micro-entrepreneurs (Implementers):

Sanitation micro entrepreneurs need to understand the needs of financing institutions if they
want to access working capital loans at attractive rates. While sanitation entrepreneurs are in tune with market peak and low demand seasons, none of the other sanitation stakeholders share this insight. Experimenting ways to leverage these naturally occuring peaks and lows might offer us key insights on how to improve sanitation outcomes.

Rural Households (Customers):

Rural households first need to solve a set of sanitation related problems before they can invest in
a sanitation solution.

Role of various actors have been convincingly defined. It can apply in most developing countries.
The study is available at: www.ircwash.org/sites/default/files/sani...y_report_final_2.pdf


F H Mughal