In this session's materials, we will discuss a third class or type of policy intervention, information treatments. One of the most common and popular policy interventions in the WASH sector is to provide information to households. Or other stakeholders and hope that the recipients of this information will change their behavior in desirable ways. For example, one could tell households about the health benefits of handwashing and then hope that this would result in more handwashing. Or one could tell households about the germ theory of disease and the presence of pathogens in some sources of drinking water in hopes that this information would lead to some households boiling or otherwise treating their drinking water. You can think of an information treatment as an indirect policy instrument. The objective is not simply that households understand germ theory, which might be the immediate outcome of the intervention. In this example, the hope is that understanding germ theory is an intermediate step in a causal chain of outcomes that will result in the construction and use of improved water and sanitation services. Then there will be fewer lives lost in episodes of illness due to the use of poor water and sanitation services. Sometimes information treatments are referred to as software interventions in contrast to hardware interventions such as point of use treatment technologies or hand pumps. In the materials for this session we will discuss four different types of information treatments and look at some of the evidence on how well they work. In this first introductory video I will present a simple topology of four different types of information treatments that are used in the WASH sector.. Then in each of the remaining videos for this sessions materials I will focus in more depth on one of these four types of information treatments presented in the topology. This slide presents our simple topology of four types of information treatments. The columns show whether the information treatment is a short term, perhaps one time intervention, or whether it is an intervention that must be repeated regularly. The rows show whether the information treatment respects consumer sovereignty or whether it has the explicit goal of changing households' behavior. Case I, in the northwest corner of the table, is a case of information treatments that provide objective information to households, as a one-off or short term intervention. In this case the agency responsible for the intervention assumes that the households will make the best use of this information to further the household's interest. In other words whatever the household does with this information is fine with the agency. The agency's hope may be that the household will change it's behavior in a particular way but the agency does not claim to know what is best for each household. Consumer sovereignty is respected. Nor does the agency wish to incur the expense of repeatedly providing this information. An example of a case one information treatment would be to provide households with objective information about the quality of their drinking water, just once. If a household's drinking water shows evidence of contamination, the assumption is that the household will have enough sense to do something about it. If the household does not change its behavior and continues to drink contaminated water, the assumption may be that it has weighed the risk and benefits and made its own decision how best to proceed. Perhaps the household has better more pressing uses of its limited time in financial budget than treating its drinking water. Another possibility is the household already knew its water was contaminated, was already taking action to reduce its drinking water contamination. Or perhaps the drinking water is contaminated but the levels of contamination are not too bad. But at least the household has been informed and provided with the information it needs to make its decision. Case II in the northeast cell of the table is a class of information treatment that provides objective information to households in an ongoing regular basis. And consumer sovereignty is again respected. However, in this case, the underlying assumption may be that households need to be reminded of this information periodically otherwise the household will forget or not be able to recall a relevant information. Alternatively the information may vary over time. The household needs to be provided with periodic updates. The simple example would be to include tariff information in a household's water bill. As discussed in our materials on the design of water tariffs, the water utility wants households to know how their water bills are calculated. The water utility also may want to convey information about how the cost of providing water services changes in different seasons. As we saw, a one way to do this is through a seasonal pricing. Again, the consumer sovereignty assumption holds that if a household still wants to pay, sees no peak prices rather than reduced its water use, the household knows the value of water to its members better than the water utility. It is free to use more water, and pay the higher seasonal peak price. One reason that the information in a water bill can be provided periodically, is that the water bill is delivered on a regular basis so that the provision of information's cheap. Health education interventions in rural areas maybe more expensive and thus more likely to be one off or short term investments. Case III in the southwest cell at the table is a class of information treatments that provides information to households with the explicit goal of the specific behavioral change like stopping open defecation. Here the agency does not necessarily respect consumer sovereignty rather the agency typically will want to do what it takes to change a household’s behavior. Information treatment may not be as objective as in cases I and II because an assumption is that the household does not know its own best interest anyway and will be unlikely to make effective use of objective information. On the other hand, the agency does know what's best for the households, and needs to persuade households to pursue this course of action. Thus, in Case III, the information treatment does not need to provide a household with a balance presentation of information. Instead, the agency decides what information to include in the treatment, and what to exclude. Based on an assessment of what would be most effective in inducing the desired behavioral change. Community led total sanitation is a good example of a case three information treatment. Here the objective is to collect and present information about a community's open defecation practices, to induce the extensive disgust and shame which will motivate a collective community effort to stop open defecation practices. This is a one time intervention organized by outside facilitators. The intervention is too labor intensive and thus too extensive to undertake on a regular basis. Moreover, the shock value of the intervention would be lost with repeated treatments. Note how different this type of intervention is from a health education program designed to give people the facts about water and health. The United Nations initiative to declare access to improved water and sanitation a human right is another example of a case three information treatment. Case IV in the Southeast cell of the table is a class of information treatment that provides repeated information at households with explicit goal of a specific behavioral change. Like the information treatments in Case II, the interventions in Case IV are long term and typically periodic. And like the information treatments in Case III, the explicit goal is a specific behavioral change. In Case IV, there is little effort to respect consumer sovereignty. A good example of a case four information treatment would be WASH education in primary schools. Here the goals to teach kids about the health benefits of improved water and sanitation in order to change their lifelong behaviors, as well as those of other family members. The information provided to children may be objective but it need not be a nuance presentation of risk and cost. Videos are often produced to convey simple key messages to kids. We've provided some examples of such videos with this session's materials. Another example of a case for intervention would be to provide social norms information with a household's water bill with the explicit goal of promoting water conservation, that is reducing households' water use. We will look at an example of the social norms intervention in the subsequent materials for this session. To conclude this presentation of our topology, I want to make two additional points. First, information treatments are not mutually exclusive and information treatments often coupled with hardware interventions. For example, a donor made designer program that has both a health education component, and the construction of new water infrastructure such as hand pumps and deep wells. The underlying assumption is that households might not use the new water source without more education about the technology's health benefits. Also, one information treatment can be coupled with another. For example, water tariff information can be coupled with social norms information on households' water bills. On the other hand, some people argue that providing information, or software, and constructing infrastructure, or hardware, may be substitutes, not complements. In other words you only need to do one of the other, because if both works it will be a waste of money to pay for software and hardware. Second, is important to recognize that the information treatments can be directed not only households but also at other stakeholders in the sector. For example, the United Nations initiative to clear water or human right is targeting not only a households but also a donors in national governments. Our donors often try to provide information to government officials especially those in the ministry of finance to convince them to increase budget allocations to the water sector. Or information on household demand for improved WASH services maybe conveyed to private sector actors to convince them that a market exists for innovative new water treatment technologies. In this session, there are six videos. This introductory video is the first, followed by five more. There's one video for case one of our topology. There is one video for case two. But there are two videos for case three. And then there's one video for case four. In the next, second, video, we will look in more detail at an example of a case one information treatment.
