Dr Britta Augsburg

We study the effectiveness of a community-level information and mobilization intervention to reduce open defecation (OD) and increase sanitation investments in Nigeria. The results of a cluster-randomized control trial in 246 communities, conducted between 2014 and 2018, suggest that average impacts are exiguous.

We study theoretically and empirically the demand for microcredit under different liability arrangements and risk environments.

Our study contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development.

In this report, we focus on understanding the context for the Sanitation Marketing (SanMark) intervention and potential initial impacts, after its gradual development and roll-out to selected treatment areas in the Nigerian states of Ekiti and Enugu.

Holy cows or cash cows? The economic return to livestock in rural India

FINISH Impact Evaluation Report

This paper uses unique primary data on directly elicited individual subjective expectations to analyse and characterize the process that generates the income of poor, rural Indian households.

Many low-income countries face the hefty challenge of increasing sanitation coverage, in both rural and urban areas, which demand different solutions. In response, governments, with support from international agencies, bilateral donors and non-government organisations, are deploying a range of programmes and policies to accelerate progress towards the new global goals. Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is one popular approach. CLTS works with an entire community to identify the negative effects of poor sanitation, especially the practice of open defecation, and empowers them to collectively find solutions. CLTS is understood to be more suitable for small, rural and homogeneous communities, however it is still considered an appropriate solution for more urbanised areas. In this brief, we provide quantitative evidence to support this conjecture and bring forward a simple rule of thumb that allows more efficient programme targeting. We suggest that using this information can improve the targeting of CLTS in Nigeria, and possibly other countries, freeing up scarce resources to identify and test complementary sanitation approaches suitable for more urbanised communities.

This paper contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development.

This report, written in collaboration with Indepth Precision Consulting, Nigeria, presents a detailed description of the baseline data collected as part of the Formal Research Component of WaterAid UK's Project “Sustainable Total Sanitation Nigeria -implementation, learning, research, and influence on practice and policy" (STS Nigeria), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) are working on a number of sanitation evaluation studies, two of them in India (in the states of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu) and one in Nigeria (in Enugu and Ekiti). In this short review the authors discuss the types of sanitation interventions that will be evaluated in the context of these studies.

This research summary provides a nuanced review of recent analysis of the impact of microfinance.

The authors use primary data collected in both rural and urban contexts in two states of India to understand determinants of toilet ownership and acquisition and subsequently to analyse the acquisition of toilets in the context of an intervention that alleviated one of the major constraints to acquisition - financial resources.

Early childhood development in the Slums of Cuttack , Odisha, India Baseline report

The authors present evidence from a randomised field experiment in rural Mongolia to assess the poverty impacts of a joint-liability microcredit program targeted at women.