To Use Financial Incentives or Not? Insights from Experiments in Encouraging Sanitation Investments in Four Countries

Sanghmitra Gautam, Michael Gechter, Raymond Guiteras and A. Mushfiq Mobarak 

World Development, 187:106791, March 2025, doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106791. PDF

Abstract: We conduct a systematic re-analysis of intervention-based studies that promote hygienic latrines and evaluate via experimental methods. We impose systematic inclusion criteria to identify such studies and compile their microdata to harmonize outcome measures, covariates, and estimands across studies. We then re-analyze their data to report metrics that are consistently defined and measured across studies. We compare the relative effectiveness of different classes of interventions implemented in overlapping ways across four countries: community-level demand encouragement, sanitation subsidies, product information campaigns, and microcredit to finance product purchases. In the sample of studies meeting our inclusion criteria, interventions that offer financial benefits generally outperform information and education campaigns in increasing adoption of improved sanitation. Contrary to a policy concern about sustainability, financial incentives do not undermine usage of adopted latrines. Effects vary by share of women in the household, in both positive and negative directions, and differ little by poverty status.

Replication code and data: Guiteras, Raymond, 2024, "Replication Data for: To Use Financial Incentives or Not? Insights from Experiments in Encouraging Sanitation Investments in Four Countries", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UADUOW, Harvard Dataverse.

Previously circulated as Guatam, S., M. Gechter, R.P. Guiteras and A.M. Mobarak, "Encouraging Rural Sanitation Take-up: Insights from Experimental Evaluations of Interventions," CEnREP Working Paper No. 24-001, January 2024, https://go.ncsu.edu/cenrep.wp.24.001. PDF.