The case for marketing sanitation

Tackling the millennium sanitation goal calls for fresh thinking and innovative approaches. Marketing sanitation, building on perceived benefits, offers a new approach to ensure that communities have access to safer services. Access to sanitation, the hygienic disposal of human excreta, has been largely achieved through the private sector supplying individual households. Evidence from what works indicates that development of the market is the only sustainable approach to meeting the need for sanitation in the developing word.
This field note explains step-by-step the process of marketing sanitation, how to reach the customer and how to persuade him to buy or use a product or a service, and suggests that it should be promoted as a central feature of sanitation improvement programs. The marketing approach does not mean that governments should relieve itself of the responsibility for sanitation and leave it to the local building trade. The public sector must understand existing demand for sanitation, and what limits it. It has to overcome these limits, and promote additional demand. Development of the right products to meet this demand has to be stimulated, the development of a thriving sanitation industry facilitated, and waste transport and final disposal regulated.
The marketing of sanitation offers a whole new approach to ensuring that people get toilets. It implies rethinking the role of the public sector, to harness the power of the market and helping it to do its job.