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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).
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