Women place a higher value on household toilets

Women in Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam put a greater value on their household toilets than men do. This is one of the outcomes of an interesting multi-country study of sanitation experience by the Water and Sanitation Program for East Asia and the Pacific.

The findings suggest that those promoting sanitation schemes should treat women as 'valued customers' and give them a greater voice in how toilets are planned and installed. However, there is also evidence that the extra work involved in keeping toilets clean and ready for use is falling on the women in the family.

Achieving sustained sanitation for the poor ? Policy lessons form Participatory Assessments documents field research in 36 rural communities with unusually high sanitation coverage rates (at least twice the national coverage) in the three countries.

Women in all three countries consistently gave higher 'value for cost' scores to their toilets than men did. Women in Indonesia and Vietnam also mentioned more benefits than men. The benefits that women valued more highly were convenience, privacy and a clean home environment. Men in Cambodia and Vietnam valued the ability to use night soil from latrines as a fertiliser marginally more highly than women did.

Women's greater interest in sanitation was also evident from the fact that they initiated the process for acquiring family latrines in 18 out of 24 communities in Indonesia and Cambodia. Men rarely initiated a discussion about acquiring a family latrine. In Vietnam, men made the final decision on the basis of a joint discussion between men and women. In Cambodia and Indonesia, men and women decided together in half the cases. When there was no joint decision, men were more likely to take the decision in Indonesia and women were more likely to do so in Cambodia.

In general in Indonesia and Vietnam people agreed that the value of the benefits from household latrines exceeded the costs of construction and maintenance. In Cambodia the value of the benefits were perceived to be marginally lower than costs.

Author Nilanjana Mukherjee, Senior Community development Specialist at WSP EAP, has drawn up policy recommendations based on the findings. She says that in view of women's greater interest and influence on family decisions regarding sanitation improvements, projects should evidently treat women as 'valued customers' and seek to strengthen their voice. This can take the form of ensuring that women are fully informed of options and costs. It can also mean more actively promoting women's access to credit for sanitation and offering women training in income generating skills such as mason training for sanitation. In general, users of pour-flush latrines in all three countries were close to being fully satisfied with their toilets (75-100 per cent satisfaction), provided water was available close by for flushing. Again, women were more satisfied than men in each country.

In Indonesia, dissatisfaction with pour-flush toilets comes from having to carry water from a distance, or from the poor quality of the low-cost pans provided by projects. Women in Cambodia and Indonesia complained that cement pans were difficult to clean. They were planning to replace them with ceramic pans as soon as they could afford to do so.

It is worth highlighting that in the survey men did not generally carry water to the toilets, and would not use them if there was no water available. It therefore fell on the women to keep the latrine's water tank or bucket filled, adding to their long list of chores.

There is a clear desire amongst rural people everywhere to upgrade facilities to a level that they may be unable to afford at the time when a project is first launched. Sanitation programmes can capitalise on this by offering a range of upgradeable options that can be introduced later at a range of costs.

Local NGO-based field researchers used a specific sequence of techniques developed for this study, combining tools form the Methodology for Participatory Assessments (MPA), Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST).

Contact: Nilanjana Mukherjee, nmukherjee@worldbank.org

Source: Ms. Nilanjana Mukherjee (2001), Achieving sustained sanitation for the poor ? Policy Lessons from Participatory Assessments in Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam, Water and Sanitation Program for East Asia and the Pacific, Jakarta

Keywords

• Sanitation
• Gender