23/01/2019 - Government Policies | Mainstorming

IAS Parliament 6 years

KEY POINTS

The SBM’s primary emphasis on the usage of toilets transforms it from an infrastructure-focused “toilet construction” programme to a much more complex behaviour change social revolution.

Challenges to SBM

The four major challenges we faced were the 4 S:

1. Scale — 550 million people needed to change their behaviour.

2. Speed — the programme had to be implemented in 5 years.

3. Stigma — centuries-old taboos, for example, it was impure to have a toilet inside or near the home, needed to be challenged.

4. Sustainability — having to make the recently changed behaviour stick. There was little prior experience of doing all this, which made the learning curve, and the degree of difficulty, even steeper.

· SBM was marketing a product (household toilets) for which, in most cases, there was no intrinsic demand.

· The SBM “market”, however, is more complex, where there is no inherent demand for “goods” (toilets) due to a “preference” for defecating in the open.

· From the supply side, therefore, the programme needed to provide both toilets as well as a behaviour programme at scale for changing preferences.

· In the case of the SBM, the major competition to toilets was the deeply ingrained habit of open defecation and cultural norm of not having a toilet near one’s residence.

Lessons learnt from SBM implementation

· The SBM learned by doing that if the competing product to toilet usage was open defecation, then that had to be tackled not by engaging with individuals and trying to persuade them to “buy” our product — an individual household twin-pit latrine — but by marketing the product to an entire village community.

· This was done by using different “triggers” to convince them that open defecation was a public “bad” and that usage of toilets was a public “good”.

· It took great effort to have trained village motivators (swachhagrahis) familiar with the local language and idiom work to convince the community as a whole that the health and dignity of the entire village were at stake if they persisted in open defecation.

· It was extremely painstaking work and it literally “took a village”, peer pressure and whole-hearted community participation to make a village ODF.

The degree of difficulty was intensified by the fact that sustaining the change in behaviour is even more difficult than achieving it. Lessons from the SBM could be usefully applied to other programmes requiring intensive behaviour change campaigns at scale.