Willingness to pay and the role of informational and supply-side constraints

While urbanization can bring benefits for economic, cultural and societal development, a rapid pace of urbanization can create enormous challenges. However, cities in low and middle-income countries, in particular, are struggling to keep up with necessary infrastructure investment especially on the water, sanitation, and hygiene. It is generally accepted that public and community toilets (CTs) will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be an important solution to improve sanitary conditions in slums, given numerous constraints to increasing access to safely-managed private toilets. Even where CTs are available, open defecation remains common behavior among slum-dwellers. In India, CTs have been widely introduced in slums, but they are only used by 15% of slum-dwellers. This study has three main objectives-

1. to document slum dwellers’ the willingness to pay (WTP) for community toilets and its link with usage; 2. to identify the impact of releasing supply-side or both supply-side and informational constraints on WTP and usage; 3. to determine the time horizon of such impacts (short-term, longer-term, or both);

To do so, researchers implemented a cluster-randomized design in 110 slums in the Lucknow and Kanpur cities of Uttar Pradesh, India.