Study Explores the Complexities of the Sanitation Marketplace. Globalwaters.org, July 24, 2018.
If you thought that sanitation marketing required only the connecting of customers, products, and financing to succeed, then you may wonder why it has proven so challenging to take this intervention to scale. 
It turns out, “Not only is scaling up market-based sanitation hard work, it takes time,” according to Rishi Agarwal, the presenter of the recent webinar on Scaling Market-Based Sanitation that discussed findings from a USAID Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) project desk review. Agarwal is a managing director of FSG and lead author of the study.
The study systematically reviewed available market-based sanitation (MBS) literature and identified only 18 single-country, truly market-based interventions that scaled to at least 10,000 toilets. “A fairly low bar for scale,” says Agarwal; he adds, however, that “five of the interventions studied did reach a scale of 100,000 toilets.”
Despite the challenges, researchers identified common threads they believe other interveners can leverage to help scale market-based sanitation. They presented a framework to better understand how sanitation markets work and to diagnose and problem-solve for the barriers to scale across the sanitation market system.
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