The role of informational and credit constraints in sanitation uptake

Last registered on November 16, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
The role of informational and credit constraints in sanitation uptake
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0001955
Initial registration date
August 04, 2017

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
August 04, 2017, 3:26 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
November 16, 2023, 10:40 AM EST

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
University of Kent

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Institute for Fiscal Studies
PI Affiliation
Institute for Fiscal Studies
PI Affiliation
University College London and Institute for Fiscal Studies

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2014-09-14
End date
2017-10-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Achieving the United Nation’s ambitious target of eliminating open defecation by 2025 demands a thorough understanding of binding constraints to toilet uptake by households. In particular, adoption of safe toilets by poor households is thought to be restricted by credit and informational constraints. Safe toilets entail large investments, accounting for several months of household income for even basic low-cost options. Moreover, households may be unaware of the costs and benefits of safe sanitation. In this study, we consider the impacts of alleviating these constraints on the uptake of safe sanitation in rural India. We do so using a cluster randomised control trial in rural Maharashtra, where we randomly allocate 120 Gram Panchayats (GPs) to one of three arms: (i) access to micro-credit loans for sanitation; (ii) access to micro-credit loans for sanitation, and awareness creation activities; and (iii) a control arm where neither of these interventions was offered. Micro-credit loans could be accessed by the clients of our partner microfinance institution only. In addition to the uptake of safe sanitation, we will also consider whether the interventions improve usage of safe sanitation, and toilet quality, whether they change perceptions of costs and benefits of safe sanitation, and whether microcredit for sanitation crowds out investments on other dimensions, e.g. business. Finally, the design will also allow us to shed light on whether poor households are credit constrained, and not simply credit rationed, for sanitation investments.


External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Attanasio, Orazio et al. 2023. "The role of informational and credit constraints in sanitation uptake." AEA RCT Registry. November 16. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.1955-3.0
Former Citation
Attanasio, Orazio et al. 2023. "The role of informational and credit constraints in sanitation uptake." AEA RCT Registry. November 16. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/1955/history/201845
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We evaluate the effectiveness of two interventions: (i) access to micro-credit for sanitation; and (ii) sanitation credit combined with awareness creation activities.

The credit intervention provides access to collateral-free, joint liability micro-credit loans for sanitation to clients of a partner microfinance institution. Only individuals who have been clients of the microfinance institution for at least 1 year are eligible to apply for a sanitation loan. The loan covers a maximum amount of Rs. 15000, charging a 22% interest rate annually at a declining balance over a 2-year repayment period. The loans are intended to be used to construct a new toilet or to repair an existing toilet.

The awareness creation activities are delivered through an NGO and disseminate information on sanitation issues to staff and clients of the microfinance institution, and to the broader community through community-wide activities. Clients of the microfinance institution receive information sessions during their weekly meetings with the loan officer, and were also invited to attend half-day branch-level workshops (Note that each branch covers a radius of around 25 km from the branch office). The community-wide activities included street plays and wall paintings, as well as engagement with community leaders to gain support for their activities and to strengthen awareness of sanitation and hygiene issues, and training of masons on how to construct different low-cost models of safe toilets. The information sessions, wall paintings and street plays disseminated the benefits of safe sanitation on health and non-health dimensions (e.g. safety of females); as well as on the availability and costs of different types of low-cost safe toilets.
Intervention Start Date
2015-01-01
Intervention End Date
2017-09-15

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
The primary outcome will be safe toilet uptake (separately among clients, and non-clients of the microfinance institution).
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
A safe toilet will be defined to be an improved facility for which excreta is safely disposed of in situ or off-site.

Toilet quality will be measured using an index combining household responses to materials used to construct the toilet, and surveyor observations of the toilet. An indicator for a good quality toilet will also be constructed from these variables.

Toilet usage will be measured from questions asking where different groups of household members (e.g. male adults) defecate. They will be coded as using a safe toilet if they use a facility considered to be safe according to the definition above.

Business profits will be calculated as the difference between revenues and expenditures on the two main enterprises of the household

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary outcomes will be toilet quality, toilet usage and open defecation (separately among clients and non-clients of the microfinance institution).
Other outcomes we will study are effects on total household credit, sanitation credit, business investments and profits, education investments, perceptions of costs and benefits of toilets, and uptake of a subsidy for toilet construction offered by the Government of India's Swaccha Bharat Mission policy. All analyses will be conducted separately for clients and non-clients of the microfinance institution.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Toilet quality will be measured as an index combining household reports and surveyor observations of the toilet.
Toilet usage and open defecation at the household level will be measured as a weighted average of these behaviours across different age-gender groups within the household.
Total household credit will be calculated as the sum of the three largest loans of value > INR 500 taken by the household since the intervention began; and the three largest loans of value < INR 500 taken by households.
Sanitation credit will be measured as a binary variable, and by the value of credit for sanitation purposes
Business investments will be measured as a binary variable for any such investment since baseline

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The study covers two districts in the Indian state of Maharashtra.Within these districts, we cover 120 gram panchayats (GPs), the smallest administrative unit by the Government of India.They have been selected according to two main criteria: (i) they should fall
within currently active operational areas and (ii) neither sanitation loans nor health insurance products should have been offered at any point in time to community members by our implementing partner.
120 GPs were selected from 133 eligible GPs to be part of the study. The 120 GPs were then assigned to one of the 3 study arms (2 treatment, 1 control) through stratified random sampling, with strata defined according to the district and whether the village was large (> 480 households).
For the baseline survey, we randomly sampled around 30 households per GP stratified by (i) whether a client of our implementing partner ( Grameen Koota) lives in the household and (ii) whether a child under the age of two years lives in the household. The intervention design establishes treatment being clustered at GP level, randomly assigning GPs to different treatment groups, i.e. control, GK (provision of sanitation loans by Grameen Koota) and 'GK + ND' (provision of sanitation loans by Grameen Koota + awareness creation activities by an NGO - Navya Disha). For the endline survey, we re-survey the 3600 households sampled at the baseline (1800 clients of GK, and 1800 non-clients), and supplement this sample with a further 2400 clients sampled from women who were clients at baseline in the 120 study communities.
Experimental Design Details
Further details on the trial design and interventions can be found here: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7957
Randomization Method
Randomisation done in office by a computer using Stata 13
Randomization Unit
Gram Panchayat
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
120 Gram Panchayats
Sample size: planned number of observations
The evaluation sample will consist of 4,200 households who had a member who was a client of the microfinance institution before baseline (1,800 interviewed at baseline and endline, and 2,400 at endline only), and 1,800 households without a member who is a client of the microfinance institution before baseline (interviewed at baseline and endline). The panel sample of 3,600 households was also stratified by the presence of children aged 0-2 years at baseline.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
41 Gram Panchayats (GPs) control,
40 GPs sanitation loans only,
39 GPs sanitation loans + awareness creation activities
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
We provide minimum detectable effect sizes for uptake of safe toilets among the whole endline sample, client households only, and non-client households only for a power of 0.8, a significance level of 0.05 and assuming two-sided tests. We also assume attrition of around 10% of the panel sample, evenly distributed among client and non-client households. For the full sample, with 47 households per cluster on average at endline, and assuming a intra-class correlation of 0.15, this design will allow us to detect increases in safe toilet uptake of around 12.87 percentage points. For clients only, with an ICC of 0.15, the minimum detectable effect size will be 12.42 percentage points, while that for non-clients will be 14.2 percentage points. Inclusion of controls such as the education of the household head greatly reduces the ICC, and allows us to detect smaller effect sizes.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
UCL Research Ethics Committee
IRB Approval Date
2013-10-21
IRB Approval Number
2168/008
IRB Name
Institute of Sustainable Development Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2014-09-29
IRB Approval Number
NA
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
August 15, 2017, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
Yes
Data Collection Completion Date
September 30, 2017, 12:00 +00:00
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)
120 clusters: 41 control, 40 sanitation loans only and 39 sanitation loans + information
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?
No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations
5,992 households - 4,222 client households, 1770 non-client households
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms
120 clusters: 41 control, 40 sanitation loans only and 39 sanitation loans + information Client households: 1598 control, 1258 sanitation loans only, 1366 sanitation loans + information Non-client households: 606 control, 586 sanitation loans only, 578 sanitation loans + information
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Yes
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Abstract
Imperfect capital markets and commitment problems impede lumpy human capital investments. Labeled loans have been postulated as a potential solution to both constraints, but little is known about the role of the label in influencing investment choices in practice. We draw on a cluster randomized controlled trial in rural India to test predictions from a theoretical model, providing novel evidence that labeled microcredit is effective in influencing household borrowing and investment decisions and increasing take-up of a lumpy human capital investment, a toilet.
Citation
Britta Augsburg, Bet Caeyers, Sara Giunti, Bansi Malde, Susanna Smets, Labeled loans and human capital investments, Journal of Development Economics, Volume 162, 2023, 103053, ISSN 0304-3878.
Abstract
We exploit novel data collected within a randomized controlled trial of a sanitation microcredit intervention to study how intra-household gender differences in perceptions of costs and benefits of sanitation impact investment decisions. We show that – as long as the wife is involved in household decision-making – the intra-household differences in perceptions we document influence borrowing and investments: uptake of the sanitation loan is higher among households where the wife has higher benefit perception, whereas successful conversion to a toilet depends on differences in monetary cost perceptions. The estimated effects are consistent with the predictions of a model of intra-household decision-making.
Citation
Britta Augsburg, Bansi Malde, Harriet Olorenshaw, Zaki Wahhaj, To invest or not to invest in sanitation: The role of intra-household gender differences in perceptions and bargaining power, Journal of Development Economics, Volume 162, 2023, 103074, ISSN 0304-3878

Reports & Other Materials

Description
Endline report
Citation
Attanasio,Orazio Pietro; Augsburg,Britta; Caeyers,Bet; Giunti,Sara; Malde,Bansi Khimji.2018. Incentivizing Sanitation Uptake and Sustainable Usage through Microfinance : Endline Report (English). Washington, D.C. : World Bank Group.