48 • There should be research and development of guidelines about the operation and maintenance of the options. • The consideration of possibly redefining ‘community’ cost sharing to include the users and others in the area who benefit from the installations. In addition, people/organizations who work in the area for the purposes of health or social welfare advancement should also be included, as opposed to only the residents sharing the costs. This may contribute to increasing the affordability capacity of the residents.
Chapter 7 People’s Knowledge and Hygiene Practices 7.1 Overview People’s knowledge concerning the various aspects of WS is essential for sustainable behavioral improvement. The knowledge concerning the operation and maintenance of options is also important in order to provide the opportunity to improve sustainable behavior. Both knowledge and technological improvements may be attempted in phases based on the programme and available resources. In Bauniabad, the main challenge was to provide basic sanitation as demanded by the people based on the local context, and the limited available resources. As of 1999, the people who were surveyed had access to the improved WS options; all for piped water and over 70% to biogas based sewerage system. The environmental and institutional situation as well as the needs changed with time. However, significant knowledge and attitude improvement, and related applied research scopes about the new concepts, could not be attempted due to financial limitations, leading to challenges in both piped water and wastewater management, which was observed during the case study. In the following sections, we will discuss the knowledge and hygiene practices of the people of Bauniabad. 7.2 Knowledge and WS Practices The people of Bauniabad were provided with a water and sanitation educational intervention during 1995-1997. As reported earlier (Chapter 2), the proper knowledge concerning health impacts and its relation to the use and maintenance of WS options improved significantly during the educational intervention project. At that time, the willingness to pay for sanitation was almost nothing, but there was a demand for safe water and the willingness to pay for it. However, also at that time, the behavior of the residents of the settlement concerning sanitation did not improve much due to the lack of access to appropriate technological options (Hoque et al., 1998). After 1997, though there was no education intervention about WS, there was both a demand for the improved technologies, and a willingness to use it among the people based on the results of the R&D project, in which the people were able to observe the testing of different types of sanitation options. Furthermore, it was shown in Chapter 6 that the people had shared, and were willing to pay, a significant amount for the improved sanitation option (biogas based sewerage system), proving their demand and acceptance of it. This demand and acceptance of the improved option was a result of them being given the opportunity to observe the testing of the various options, from which they were able to recognize that the biogas based sewerage system was the best, in terms of both its capability in the reduction of organic pollutants, and its cost effectiveness compared with the other options. In addition, when the piped water system was installed in 1999, many people had paid more for the safe piped water option than they did for the pump water option (Chapter 5), also proving their demand and acceptance of the piped water system. Therefore, the main reasons for the change in practice was due to the availability of new (piped water and biogas) options and their acceptance of them, which was a result of their participation in helping recognize the need for improved technologies. 7.3 Knowledge Concerning the Roles of Water and Sanitation Table 7.1 shows the responses of the women surveyed concerning the effects of water and sanitation in health. Most of the women knew that drinking of polluted water or the use of unhygienic latrines might cause diarrhea. However, a significantly lesser proportion of women knew the effects of these practices in relation to other health impacts. It is interesting to note that the people of the area were highly concerned about the dirty appearance of their living areas caused by poor latrines. This indicates that the people were more concerned about human waste disposal due to placing more importance on cleanly appearance and/or aesthetic purposes than health reasons. Similar results were observed from a successful rural sanitation project in Bangladesh (Hoque et al., 2004). Table 7.1: Knowledge concerning health impacts (sample size 222). 49
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