Targeted sanitation subsidies for climate vulnerable households

June (below) verses October (above) in Samroang Saean Village, Kampong Chhnang Province, Cambodia (iDE / Tyler Kozole)

This Water, WASH & Climate story was authored by Tyler Kozole, iDE

Our story is from a climate vulnerable part of Cambodia, the Tonle Sap Lake. The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and is home to over three million people. In the rainy season, the lake expands to five times its size, inundating the surrounding countryside.

Communities around the lake have learnt to live with this annual flood, building elevated homes on stilts and houses that float, but water and sanitation remain a major challenge. Improved sanitation coverage is nonexistent in some villages and the water that surrounds many households for months each year is at constant risk of contamination.

Ms Yun’s story

As farmers in Samroang Saean village, which floods for at least four months of the year, Ms Yun Srey Lak and her husband could not prioritise the cost of installing a toilet over providing food for the family. The burden of not having a latrine weighed heavily. In the dry season, without a toilet, Srey Lak, her husband and two daughters would cut through the tall bushes around their home with a machete to find a private place to go. For the family, the fear of encountering snakes and sexual predators never left.

In the rainy season, the children would simply squat over the edge of their home to defecate into the water, and risk falling from the home. The adults would take the family boat out to find privacy up to 100 metres away, a dreaded task, especially during storms. While Srey Lak admired the toilets some of the neighbors had, the family could not afford one and had no plans to install one.

The need for targeted subsidies

Around the Tonle Sap, while many households don’t have the means to ensure safe sanitation, some do. Some have the financial ability to adapt their home by elevating their land or building taller, strong latrine structures that stay above the water. Not everyone needs help. In such a context, when some families can afford toilets and others, like Srey Lak’s, can’t, a blanket solution for the community to receive toilets can have negative impacts. By providing everyone - including those who can afford a toilet - with a subsidy, development implementers risk undercutting local businesses and encouraging households to wait indefinitely for a subsidy of their own. The challenge is, how can implementers specifically target families like Ms Srey Lak’s, who truly need the support?

An innovative subsidy approach targeting climate vulnerable households

Through their Water for Women Impact and Innovation project, iDE and Causal Design are exploring this question. The team is implementing an action research project on adapting targeted sanitation subsidies for climate vulnerable households. This has involved first modifying iDE’s existing sanitation subsidy mechanism to target the most climate-vulnerable households for eligibility. The tool includes metrics for assessing vulnerability based on climate, socioeconomic, and gender factors. The subsidy mechanism has been trialed for seven months in a randomised controlled trial, with the goal of assessing if and how the subsidies make an impact on sanitation uptake among climate vulnerable households. Ultimately, with learnings from this research, iDE intends to scale a climate-vulnerable sanitation subsidy to its entire operating area. 

As a sector, there is a need to develop, test and share practical, low-cost methods for identifying household level climate vulnerability. This is critical to reach the most vulnerable with climate-resilient sanitation and avoid leaving people behind. Market-sensitive approaches are imperative to ensure long-term sustainability of sanitation access after development implementers have left. 

This story was first shared as part of the This is Water, WASH & Climate: Stories from Practice, on 22 June 2022 during the Water, WASH & Climate Virtual Symposium. It has since been edited with permission.