| dc.description.abstract | Sub-Sahara African countries face immense challenges in ensuring adequate sanitation
and hygiene behaviours to the rapidly growing populations. Attempts to address these chal lenges require empirical evidence to inform policy and planning. We contribute toward that
goal by unveiling findings of formative research conducted in Babati, a rapidly growing town
in Tanzania. We conducted a cross-sectional study involving 486 households, to unwind
motives and barriers for individuals to invest in improved sanitation services and hygiene
behaviour change. We used several methods including household survey, focus group dis cussions, behaviour observations and spot checks. The findings revealed that households
derive their motivation to invest in improved sanitation and hygiene practices from comfort,
raising social status, and the need for personal safety and privacy. Other motives include
fear of penalties and fines and fear of disease outbreaks, whilst the barriers include, limited
water availability and accessibility, environmental factors, property rights, cultural issues,
financial constraints, and a person’s attitude. Quantitative data were subjected to multivari ate analysis to identify determinants of households to invest in sanitation and hygiene prac tices. The logistic regression analyses revealed that sources of water, property rights, and
education level were the main determinants of households to invest in sanitation and
hygiene facilities, while household income was the main determinant for households to
invest in both construction of handwashing facility and water treatment. We argue that the
initiative to promote sanitation and hygiene behaviour change in small towns should focus
on promoting motivation factors and abating the determinant factors identified in this study. | en_US |
