Benefits and costs of rural sanitation interventions in Ghana

Abstract

Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) has triggered households around the world to adopt latrines, but evidence suggests that CLTS does not usually lead to universal latrine coverage. Additional interventions, such as subsidies for the poor, may be necessary to eliminate open defecation. While subsidies can improve sanitation-related outcomes, no prior studies have compared the net benefits of CLTS plus subsidies to CLTS-only. This paper presents a comparative analysis for rural Ghana, where efforts to reduce open defecation have had limited success. We analyze the costs and benefits of: (1) a CLTS-only intervention, as implemented in Ghana, and (2) a variant of CLTS that provides vouchers for latrines to the poorest households in high sanitation adoption communities. We find that CLTS-only fails a deterministic benefit-cost test and that only about 30% of 10,000 Monte Carlo trials produce positive net benefits. CLTS plus subsidies satisfy a benefit-cost criterion in the deterministic case, and in about 55% of the Monte Carlo trials. This more favorable outcome stems from high adoption communities passing the threshold needed to generate positive health externalities due to improved community sanitation. The results suggest that a well-targeted CLTS plus subsidies intervention would be more effective in Ghana than CLTS alone.