Learning What Works: Gates Grantees Visit WaterSHED Program

PHNOM PENH – Between January 14 and 17 international grantees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation participated in a four-day learning event, “Learning What Works” in Cambodia. The attendees -most of whom work under the Gates Foundation’s Sanitation Delivery Models initiative- came to share updates, lessons learned, and generally to promote cross-learning and examination of important issues and questions in our sector (e.g. scalability, sustainability, monitoring, reaching the poor, etc.).

Participants were able to tour WaterSHED’s Hands-Off Sanitation Marketing program – gaining insight into how this program has enabled over 42,000 private latrine purchases by rural consumers in just the past 2 years, while maintaining a light-touch approach that keeps program costs to under 18 USD per latrine. Hands-Off Sanitation Marketing is gaining traction and attention in part because that figure represents a fraction of conventional sanitation program costs.