Working with micro-finance organisations is one way to meet the needs of the poor, as they have been specifically set up to work with poor communities and have the skills and expertise to innovate, they provide lending schemes, credit lines and other methods to provide households access to finance for sanitation products and services. In addition micro-finance organisations can also work with sanitation entrepreneurs and businesses to enable them to target their products and services to meet the base of the pyramid. However, many communities have managed to build latrine solutions with minimal finance using CLTS approaches. Communities have come together to meet the needs of the poor and marginalised. In other countries e.g. in India, the government offers subsidies for the below poverty households; another method of subsidy is output based aid where households or communities receive a partial or full subsidy on completion of connection to a sewer or for partial building of a latrine.

Please visit the Financing Sanitation section on the Resources page. 

Answer thanks to:

Yolande Coombes

Yolande Coombes has more than 20 years experience in public health, behavior change and evaluation. She gained her PhD in Public Health from the University of London. She has held academic positions at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and College of Medicine in Malawi. As a consultant she has worked on topics on a number of communicable and non-communicable diseases. She has worked for both Population Services International and Marie Stopes International providing technical social marketing, behavior change, franchising and M&E support. In 2007 she took up a position as a specialist consultant in sanitation marketing and hygiene with WSP and became a staff member in 2010 responsible for leading WSP’s sanitation and hygiene work in Africa, including task managing the AfricaSan 3 conference in 2011.

Comments: 0

Leave a Comment

Enter Word Verification in box below •