A new World Bank study identified lessons for improving cookstoves in Bangladesh through an evaluation of existing programs, the international experience on improved stoves, and the lessons from successes in the sanitation sector.
Published on: 25/08/2010
The sanitation lessons were drawn from an evaluation of the successes of Bangladesh's Total Sanitation Campaign, conducted by a research team from the Village Education Resource Center (VERC). The research team was led by Md. Yakub Hossain, with support from Anowar Hossain Mollah, A. M. Hasan Rashid Khan, Md. Quamrul Islam, Subash Chandra Saha, and Samar Prasad Das.
Experiences from the National Sanitation Program (taken from the report's executive summary) The detailed review of sanitation programs in Bangladesh focused on four organizations known to have an excellent record of accomplishment in program implementation. Programs selected for evaluation represented a range of approaches, institutional arrangements, and actors, including government, donors, and NGOs. The common theme was that they all were adhering to the basic characteristics of the Total Sanitation Campaign of the government, which aimed to achieve 100 percent sanitation coverage by 2010. The achievements of the Total Sanitation Campaign in Bangladesh illustrate that considerable development advances can take place at the village level with support for technical assistance and information dissemination without substantial direct subsidies for the improved sanitation devices. Several key lessons may be drawn from the success of the Total Sanitation Campaign. One is that strong national policy support for innovative action can dramatically transform government, partner, and community actions into a participatory social movement, which in this case led to more than 90 million people in Bangladesh gaining access to, and using, latrines in a five-year period. In this context, an important aspect of policy was a consensus among local and national governments to switch from the previous rather unsuccessful attempts to promote subsidized toilets (which are rival and excludable) to the promotion of an open defecation-free environment (which is nonrival and nonexcludable). Other important features included the availability of a wide range of low-cost and affordable sanitation hardware with the target of reaching the very poor with targeted subsidies, and the presence of a strong entrepreneur force for wider outreach, which strengthened the commercial approach and made products readily available locally.
Lessons from sanitation initiatives in Bangladesh. In: World Bank (2010). Improved cookstoves and better health in Bangladesh : lessons from household energy and sanitation programs : final report. Washington, DC, USA, Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), World Bank. P. 63-78.
Related web site: Community-led Total Sanitation - Bangladesh
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