MCD Global Health applies aggressive, efficient, and comprehensive approaches to improve access to sustained improvements in sanitation and hygiene.
Integrating Market Based Sanitation in Community-Led Activities
The community-led total sanitation (CLTS)’s zero-subsidy approach means that families plan, finance, and construct their own toilet and hand-washing facilities with technical assistance from MCD staff. This approach ensures that facilities are appropriate and families are more likely to use the facilities.
The market-based sanitation strategy includes identifying innovative and locally accepted products and services; designi ng an affordable and viable pricing model that attracts private investors to enter the business of sanitation; employing commercial-marketing techniques that create demand and sell sanitation and hygiene products; facilitating access to attractive financial products for investors, especially from the private sector; enhancing the investment environment; and connecting the demand for products and services to suppliers and financial pathways. MCD also promotes sanitation by transforming sanitation as a viable business, part of a circular economy that treats ‘waste’ as the valuable resource that it is.
Using Participatory Approaches
By identifying and training innovative local artisans and entrepreneurs to improve their business practices, our teams enable the creation, development, and dissemination of affordable, high-quality products. We support these artisans and entrepreneurs, who develop low-cost, improved latrines and hand-washing stations adapted to their community’s aspirations and means.
Removing Financial Barriers
We work to adapt or create mechanisms to remove financial barriers for households and the private sector, such as village savings and loan associations (VSLA), and other microcredit institutions. MCD’s analysis of the sanitation and hygiene market led to the development of tools to involve the private sector in a new, dynamic, and viable market.
Responding to COVID-19
In 2020, our sanitation and hygiene programs were able to quickly reorient their activities and integrate the promotion of behaviors that disrupt the spread of COVID-19.
Our extensive community-based network, as well as our existing collaborations with stakeholders at all levels, allowed our teams to respond rapidly and efficiently with interventions at the community level and through mass media. The trust gained through these collaborations resulted in communities quickly adapting these measures.
