Achieving the "Good Life": Why Some People Want Latrines in Rural Benin

This 14-page report looks at consumer motivation for acquiring sanitation in rural Benin, and the implications for new messages and strategies to promote sanitation in developing countries. The paper argues that public health programmes to improve sanitation have consistently framed promotional messages in terms of faecal-oral disease prevention and largely fail to motivate changes in sanitation behaviour. The report documents a qualitative study conducted among 40 household heads. The study showed that risk of faecal-oral disease transmission was largely not a motivating factor for installing latrines, and that motivating drives had more to do with prestige, well-being, and situational goals. The results also varied with gender, occupation, life stage, travel experience, education, and wealth reflected perceptions of the physical and social geography of the village.

The report gives 6 key recommendations for sanitation improvement marketing campaigns. It recommends that advertising campaigns should associate latrines with positive values (like prestige, privacy, convenience, modernity, cleanliness, etc) likely to appeal to existing motives for improved sanitation in the population. They should focus attention on specific inadequacies of present conditions as perceived by the population. The authors state that scientific explanations of disease transmission to promote latrines should be avoided. Instead, carefully crafted messages around good health and ill health in wider terms offer a more promising approach. They recommend improving latrine designs to enhance attributes important to drive satisfaction, and developing designs through consumer-oriented means in order to produce products that satisfy demand. The report states that given the competing alternatives for many of the drives motivating latrine adoption in rural Benin (often housing-related improvements), bundling the promotion of latrines with other highly desired house improvements may raise the image of latrines. The authors stress that campaigns must recognise that different lifestyles and environments give rise to different drives or dissatisfactions, and a single set of strategies across all segments of the population is unlikely to work. They also note that certain population groups may be very unlikely to adopt latrines no matter how much promotion is done, and should therefore not be targeted.

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