A development conundrum: The state may choose – who says the people will use?

The year is 2016. I’m sitting on the cement floor of a home in a village outside of Tulajpur, deep in the Indian state of Maharashtra. I’m surrounded by more than a dozen women entrepreneurs taking part in a focus group.

My American colleague “Lisa” and I are here conducting a USAID evaluation, as we crisscross India to assess similar projects, along with other team members. We’ve come to this place to ask entrepreneurs to share their experience with an innovative program that promotes the use of cheap and affordable solar-powered lamps, as well as other solar-powered gadgets. These savvy women, who run small shops built into the front of their houses, are a key link in the supply chain that helps off-the-grid rural Indians light their homes. The focus group discussion was animated and friendly, with any cultural barriers fading to insignificance.

Two things struck me. First, all of them had smartphones, which they were using to snap photos of us. Normally, it is the evaluators who photograph focus group members, so you could ask, who was observing whom? Although it was a relatively poor village, the women in our group clearly had above-average income levels. In 2016, only about one in six Indians owned a smartphone, and most of them were in urban areas. 

The second notable thing was the latrine situation – there was none. When our meeting ended, Lisa asked if she could use the toilet. She didn’t get a clear answer. After she asked again (the meeting had lasted three hours, after all), the woman hosting the meeting then reluctantly showed Lisa an empty room at the back of the house, which had a sink, but no running water, and a small hole in the floor. This was not a Turkish-style squat toilet with the ceramic footholds flanking a hole, either. Lisa said the room looked nothing like a bathroom, and she was not about to repurpose it. When she inquired where the women did their business, the homeowner sheepishly indicated an empty, rubbish strewn lot next door. That was the toilet, so to speak.

The incongruity of people leapfrogging to smart phones, while still practicing what in development circles is called open defecation, was striking. Although I spend a good bit of every year in developing countries, it still took me aback. The Tulajpur women were simultaneously stuck in the past – a noxious, undignified and unhealthy past – and yet benefiting from a high technology “future,” one which would have seemed like science fiction to their parents.

As this insightful article in National Geographic on the topic of latrines and open defecation makes clear, the problem of persuading people to build or use latrines is complex. Open defecation is still how 1.2 billion people on the planet relieve themselves, and almost half of those live in India. The practice comes with serious health implications as it raises the risk of infection, disease and death, especially for children.

The issue isn’t the availability of the actual physical object. Many latrines have been built, but remain unused. A complex array of factors come into play: tradition (historically, of course, all of humanity lacked toilets), to the still-extant caste system which makes it a disgrace to clean out latrine pits for anyone but the Dalits (formerly known as untouchables), to lack of sewerage systems, to a supposed aversion to enclosed spaces while defecating. Getting families or villages to build just a pit latrine – or even use one that is built for them – remains difficult. A lot of outhouses have fallen into disuse, or have been repurposed as storage sheds.

This is not to single out India, which has made tremendous strides on many socio-economic indicators, such as lowering its birth rate to 2.1 children per woman – definitely a modern phenomenon. I bring up open defecation and smartphones as examples of how governments and donors sometimes have very different priorities from the population. Getting people to use a toilet has major positive health impact. Almost no one argues for “cultural sensitivity” and just letting people get on with it in this case.

The challenge of getting rural villagers to use toilets is not that they are living in a sort of isolated, antediluvian Eden, in harmony with nature, as the solar lamps and cell phones, not to mention plastic trash strewn everywhere, make clear. I would argue that it encapsulates three problems common to many development efforts.

First, the preferences of the state do not always coincide with those of society. To paraphrase an old saying, the state proposes, but (wo)man disposes. There may be excellent, scientifically-grounded economic and health reasons to pull people into the modern world, but it turns out that people have their own preferences, or priorities, such as smartphones. Indeed, social behavior change has become a field of study in its own right. It is one thing to build something, but getting people to use it is another matter.

Second, having a vested interest is a powerful motivator. As every landlord and tenant has no doubt observed, a different attitude comes into play when you own something compared with just using it. That is why many programs that build infrastructure for communities focus on “ownership” as a concept. They require communities to contribute in kind or in cash. Yet often the cost is so high that the community contribution is not more than 5 percent, or less, and that feeling of ownership is concomitantly weak.

Three, when poor countries aspire to the public goods available in richer countries, they often end up building or buying things that they can’t afford to use. In a lot of cases, infrastructure, from the most basic latrines, to enormous projects such as hydroelectric dams, is being built in countries where they lack the technical and financial resources to maintain and operate them. Funds need to be accessed and set aside, and procedures introduced. Unfortunately, we didn’t get into a discussion with our focus group women on these issues. That was not why we were there. However, I’m sure they would have given us a valid reason for their choices, at least from their perspective.