Sanitation Marketing As An Emergent Application of Social Marketing: Experiences From East Java

Abstract

Currently the world is not on track to meet its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) sanitation target by 2015. To assist certain areas to get "back on track" to meet it, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank and its partners are implementing the Global Scaling Up Sanitation Project in East Java in Indonesia, 10 rural districts of Tanzania and the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. Its main objective is to improve access to safe sanitation to 3.8 million people by building demand, strengthening supply and improving the enabling environment. The Global Scaling Up Sanitation Project uses a combination of advocacy, capacity building, social mobilization techniques and sanitation marketing, the latter which is the focus of the article. This program-oriented article provides a general landscape of the field of sanitation marketing and highlights some of the key challenges in applying best practices and approaches from social marketing. The article showcases how the Global Scaling Up Project is seeking to overcome the challenges in East Java where innovative formative research, social franchising, product branding and integrated communications using mass media are being introduced.