HighlightsBetter sanitation accounts for Cambodia’s increase in child height from 2005 to 2010.Sanitation improvements in regions over time are associated with height improvements.Community open defecation matters more for child height than household open defecation.

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. However, it is not obvious whether, and the extent to which, the provision of labelled micro-credit-where the loan is linked to the investment only through its label-will boost human capital investments, particularly when it is characterised by other attractive attributes, such as a lower interest rate. This paper studies a cluster randomised controlled trial of a sanitation micro-credit program in rural India, which made available lower interest loans for sanitation. The loans were linked with sanitation through their name only. The loans were not bundled with any toilet, and loan use was weakly monitored, but not enforced. Hence it is not directly obvious that the loan should boost sanitation investments. A simple theoretical framework indicates that the intervention could increase sanitation ownership through three channels-relaxation of credit constraints, salience of the loan label, or the lower interest rate. The presented empirical evidence, combined with model predictions, allow to conclude that the loan label-which to date has not received much attention in the literature-significantly impacts households borrowing and investment behaviour. Labelling loans is thus a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments.

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While poverty-targeted subsidies have shown promise as a means of reducing financial constraints on low-income populations to invest in new latrines, concerns have been raised about whether they may reduce demand for new latrines among non-eligible, non-poor populations, especially in geographically limited or closed markets. Using quasi experimental methods, we investigate the interaction effects of the “CHOBA” subsidy, a partial poverty-targeted monetary incentive to build a toilet, and a sanitation marketing program (SanMark) on new latrine uptake among households from different income segments in 110 rural villages across six Cambodian provinces. These programs were implemented either jointly with or independently. Overall, we find strong complementarity of the CHOBA subsidy with SanMark where the coupled implementation of the programs increased latrine uptake across all households as compared to exclusive deployment of the programs independently. Additionally, the CHOBA subsidy alone resulted in higher gains among the poor compared to SanMark suggesting that financial constraint is indeed a significant demand barrier for new latrines. The presence of the poverty-targeted subsidies did not reduce demand for new latrine purchases among ineligible households. Instead, we find some evidence for a positive spillover effect of subsidies on uptake of latrines among ineligible households in villages where both programs were implemented indicating that the presence of sanitation subsidies and the decision to purchase latrines among non-beneficiaries can be viewed as complements. We employ multivariate logistic regressions as well as further robustness checks to estimate the effects of the different interventions, with qualitatively consistent results.

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