Sustainability of sanitation promotion and long-term impacts on health (Orissa, India)

Poor sanitation, water quality, and hygiene contribute to diarrheal diseases that cause millions of deaths each year (Lozano et al. 2012) . A number of recent studies show that latrines successfully reduce diarrheal illness and malnutrition, particularly among young children (Barnard et al. 2013; Heijnen et al. 2014; Dickinson et al. 2015). Based in part on this evidence, the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) community is now investing heavily in efforts to scale up sanitation coverage across low-income countries. However, the vast majority of prior evaluations of sanitation programs have focused only on short-term (<2 years) impacts (Waddington and Snilstveit 2009). The aims of this study are to i) fill this gap by providing the first estimates of the long-term impacts from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a sanitation promotion campaign, ii) contribute to the literature on technology adoption by exploring complementarities between environmental health technologies.

Main research collaborators:

• Jennifer Orgill, Subhrendu Pattanayak (Duke)
• Ashok Singha, Barendra Sahoo, Upendra Panda (CTRAN)
• Namrata Chindarkar, Olivia Jensen (National University of Singapore)