The service at the center of the study is EkoLakay, a container-based sanitation system operated in northern Haiti that provides households with a toilet that collects waste in sealed containers, which are swapped out weekly and transported to a treatment facility. In a country where sewer connections are rare and pit latrines often discharge untreated waste into the environment, container-based sanitation is one of the only household-level options that qualifies as safely managed sanitation under international definitions. The service currently costs 350 Haitian gourdes per month, a fee equivalent to less than three US dollars, yet even this modest amount proves prohibitive for some households. That gap between the cost of running the service and what the poorest families can afford is precisely where the question of targeted subsidies enters, and where the study makes its most consequential contribution.

To measure willingness to pay, the researchers used contingent valuation, a survey-based method in which respondents state whether they would pay a specified price for a good or service. It is a technique long used in environmental and development economics to attach values to things that lack market prices, and it requires careful design to avoid inflating or deflating responses. In this study, households were asked about their willingness to pay for EkoLakay service at different price points, and the resulting distribution tells a clear story. Sixty percent of surveyed households said they would pay the current fee of 350 gourdes per month. When the hypothetical price dropped to 250 gourdes, willingness to pay rose to 77 percent, and at 150 gourdes it reached 85 percent. In other words, demand for the service is high but highly price-sensitive, and each reduction in the monthly fee unlocks a substantial additional share of the population.

Those percentages translate directly into policy arithmetic. The authors calculate that a subsidy reducing the effective price to between 150 and 200 gourdes per month could push container-based sanitation coverage in the study area to as much as 80 percent of households. That is a striking figure for a city where safely managed sanitation coverage is otherwise minimal, and it suggests that relatively modest per-household transfers could produce large gains in public health protection. The economics hinge on the fact that the service already functions at scale; the constraint is not the technology or the collection logistics but the affordability of a recurring fee for households living close to the margin. Subsidy design, in this framing, becomes the central lever for expanding coverage rather than an afterthought.

Perhaps the most analytically interesting part of the study is its multivariate regression analysis, which examined which household characteristics were associated with willingness to pay. Three factors stood out: household wealth, the degree of privacy afforded by the household’s current sanitation arrangement, and satisfaction with that current facility. Wealthier households were more willing to pay, which is unsurprising but important, because it means that a uniform price will systematically exclude the poorest, reinforcing the case for targeted rather than universal subsidies. Households whose current toilets offered more privacy, and those who were dissatisfied with what they had, were also more willing to pay for the container-based service, indicating that the perceived quality and dignity of existing arrangements shape demand in measurable ways.

Just as revealing was what did not predict willingness to pay. Whether a household currently owned a private toilet showed no significant association with its willingness to pay for EkoLakay service. At first glance this seems paradoxical: why would families who already have a toilet pay for another one? The focus group discussions, conducted with household members and community leaders, supplied the answer. Participants described the hidden and recurring burdens of pit latrines, including the high cost of emptying a full pit, the persistent smell, and problems with pests. In dense urban neighborhoods where pits are difficult or impossible to empty safely, these costs can be substantial and unpredictable, making a flat monthly fee for a service that removes waste weekly genuinely attractive even to toilet owners.

The focus groups also surfaced contextual factors that a survey alone would have missed. Some participants expressed a desire for multiple toilets within the home, reflecting household sizes and living arrangements that a single facility cannot comfortably serve. Others pointed to the particular value of container-based sanitation in flood-prone areas, where pit latrines can overflow during heavy rains and contaminate yards, wells, and streets. Cap Haitien, like much of coastal Haiti, faces recurrent flooding that turns inadequate sanitation from a chronic nuisance into an acute hazard. In such settings, a sealed container that is removed before it fills offers a form of resilience that conventional on-site systems cannot match, and households appear to recognize and value that difference.

These findings matter well beyond northern Haiti. Container-based sanitation has attracted growing attention in the global sanitation sector as a service model for dense, low-income urban areas where sewers are infeasible and on-site systems fail to protect public health. Operators in Kenya, Ghana, Peru, and elsewhere face the same core dilemma as EkoLakay: the full cost of weekly collection and treatment cannot be recovered from the poorest customers at a price they can afford. The Cap Haitien study provides a template for how operators and governments can estimate the demand curve for such a service and identify the price point at which coverage expands most efficiently. It also demonstrates that willingness to pay is shaped by service attributes, such as privacy and flood resilience, that conventional subsidy formulas based purely on income may overlook.

The study’s implications for targeting are subtle. Because wealth predicts willingness to pay, subsidies aimed at the poorest households would reach those least able to pay the current fee, which is the standard logic of targeted transfers. But because satisfaction with existing sanitation and privacy also predict willingness to pay, a subsidy design that considers the quality of a household’s current facility, not just its income, could allocate resources more effectively. A family with a recently built, well-maintained private toilet may have less to gain from switching than a family using an unimproved shared latrine, even at similar income levels. Incorporating such indicators into eligibility criteria could stretch limited public budgets further, a consideration of acute importance in Haiti, where fiscal capacity is severely constrained and donor funding for water and sanitation is volatile.

The authors are careful to note the limits of what contingent valuation can establish. Stated willingness to pay is not the same as actual payment behavior, and hypothetical responses can diverge from what households do when a real bill arrives. Yet the consistency of the pattern across price points, the plausible direction of the regression results, and the corroborating qualitative evidence give the findings credibility, and the practical payoff is concrete: a quantified estimate that reducing the monthly fee to 150 to 200 gourdes could lift coverage to roughly 80 percent of households in the study area. For basic service providers and government partners in the region, that number converts an abstract debate about equity into a specific, costable policy choice. For the residents of Cap Haitien, it raises the prospect that a safe, dignified, and reliably collected toilet, one of the most fundamental determinants of urban health, could move within reach of the majority of families rather than a fortunate few.

Subject of Research: Willingness to pay for container-based sanitation services and targeted subsidy design in urban Haiti

Article Title: Willingness-to-pay for container-based sanitation and implications for targeted subsidy design in urban Haiti

Article References: Lubeck-Schricker, M., Bauza, V., Felix-Jean, W., Goddard, F. G., Pierre, M. F., Ozeris, B., Schelling, M., & Kramer, S. (2026). Willingness-to-pay for container-based sanitation and implications for targeted subsidy design in urban Haiti. PLOS Water, 5(9), e0000618. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000618

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000618

Keywords: container-based sanitation, willingness to pay, Haiti, Cap Haitien, sanitation subsidies, contingent valuation, EkoLakay, urban sanitation, PLOS Water, public health, pit latrines, flood resilience

The study, published in BMC Agriculture, surveyed 351 randomly selected smallholder farmers using an open-ended contingent valuation method, a technique designed to estimate what people would pay for goods and services that are not traded in conventional markets. Rather than presenting farmers with preset price ranges, which can anchor responses and inflate or distort valuations, the researchers asked respondents to freely state the maximum amount they would pay for each individual service. This methodological choice matters: because Malawi’s Department of Agricultural Extension Services has never established standard pricing for paid public extension, any close-ended survey would have struggled to identify unbiased reference prices. The resulting estimates therefore offer an unusually candid window into how farmers themselves value the advice they receive.

The pattern of demand that emerged is strikingly practical. Disease control topped the list, with 40.17 percent of farmers expressing willingness to pay, followed by crop husbandry at 23.37 percent and pest control at 22.79 percent. Livestock breeding, manure making and utilization, and livestock feed and feeding rounded out the most sought-after services. The researchers interpret this hierarchy as a reflection of farmers prioritizing support that delivers immediate, tangible benefits to productivity. With 75.5 percent of surveyed households cultivating plots of one acre or less, and 77.78 percent describing their farming as primarily subsistence-oriented, the emphasis on quick, affordable improvements in output makes economic sense. Services addressing acute threats to yield, such as pests and animal disease, command attention because losses can be catastrophic for households with no buffer.

Yet demand and valuation are not the same thing, and the study reveals a fascinating divergence between the two. The highest average willingness-to-pay amounts went not to the most demanded services but to those perceived as transformational investments. Farm mechanization led the list at an average of 9,730.77 Malawian kwacha, followed by livestock breeding at 7,065.85 kwacha and farm map production at 6,400 kwacha. At the time of the study, the exchange rate stood at roughly 1,735 kwacha to the US dollar, making these substantial sums for subsistence households. By contrast, high-demand services such as disease control and crop husbandry attracted only moderate average valuations between about 2,600 and 4,000 kwacha, suggesting farmers view them as routine or incremental rather than premium offerings.

The statistical analysis of what drives willingness to pay yielded equally revealing results. Using Ordinary Least Squares regression with robust standard errors, corrected for heteroscedasticity after a Breusch-Pagan/Cook-Weisberg test rejected constant variance, the researchers identified seven significant determinants. Male-headed households reported willingness to pay about 617 kwacha more than female-headed households, a disparity the authors link to gendered control over farm decision-making and financial resources in a country where both matrilineal and patrilineal systems shape access to productive assets. Married farmers showed significantly higher willingness to pay than single farmers, likely reflecting household stability and joint investment decisions. Each additional acre of land increased willingness to pay by 378.26 kwacha, while each additional household member reduced it by 237.23 kwacha, a negative effect the authors attribute to the resource constraints facing larger families.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerns education. Farmers with only primary education expressed significantly higher willingness to pay than those with no formal schooling, yet secondary and tertiary education showed no significant effect. The authors suggest that basic literacy and numeracy enable farmers to appreciate the value of extension advice, but more advanced education may open alternative channels of agricultural knowledge, from digital platforms to private advisory services, reducing reliance on the public system. This echoes earlier findings from Ethiopia, where better-educated farmers gravitated toward mobile-based services. Equally notable was the strong premium that integrated crop-livestock farmers placed on extension: they were willing to pay significantly more than crop-only or livestock-only producers, presumably because mixed systems offer multiple synergies, such as feeding crop residues to animals and returning manure to the soil, that expert advice can help optimize while spreading risk across income sources.

The design preferences farmers expressed for a cost-sharing model are just as consequential as the amounts they would pay. Payment preferences split almost evenly between individual and collective approaches, but the channels of payment clustered around convenience and direct accountability: 45 percent preferred handing cash directly to agricultural extension workers and 40 percent favored mobile money transfers. Traditional banking, payments at extension planning area offices, and routing money through traditional authorities or government agents attracted minimal support, likely because farmers perceive such channels as bureaucratic and complex. The mobile money result is particularly significant in a country where mobile financial services have expanded rapidly, offering a ready-made infrastructure for collecting user fees at scale.

Delivery preferences were equally emphatic. Nearly half of farmers wanted individual face-to-face consultations, while another 38.7 percent preferred group-based sessions; radio, SMS, magazines, and television attracted only marginal interest, and email none at all. This preference for in-person interaction is reinforced by the study’s finding of a striking gap between physical access and actual service: although 64.95 percent of farmers live within 10 kilometers of an extension office, 68.95 percent received only one or no visits from an extension officer in the previous year. With 72.93 percent of farmers having only primary education, the limited capacity to engage with digital platforms makes direct, personalized interaction not merely a preference but a practical necessity. The data suggest that any cost-sharing system built around remote or digital delivery would miss the majority of its intended clientele.

One of the most sobering details in the study is that 61.54 percent of farmers were unaware of Malawi’s cost-sharing policy direction, despite the country’s 2000 policy framework, titled Agricultural Extension in the New Millennium, having explicitly endorsed pluralistic, demand-driven services under the principle that those who benefit pay. That farmers still expressed strong willingness to pay despite this awareness gap points, the authors argue, to a deeper intrinsic demand for relevant, responsive advisory services. The finding aligns closely with earlier Malawian research that reported an almost identical 86 percent support for participatory, demand-led extension. It also stands in sharp contrast to studies from elsewhere in Africa, including one from eastern Ethiopia where only 10.5 percent of farmers were willing to pay, underscoring how context-specific these dynamics are and why localized evidence is essential for policy design.

The policy implications are considerable. The authors recommend tiered pricing or targeted subsidies for services with high to moderate demand, gender-sensitive pricing and awareness campaigns to improve uptake among women-headed households, and continued free provision for less-valued services with broader community benefits, such as environmental management, HIV/AIDS awareness, and farmer organization development, which farmers appear to regard as public goods that should remain publicly funded. They also caution that the study’s cross-sectional design leaves room for further research into additional socio-economic and institutional factors, and that the actual costing of extension services in Malawi remains to be established. Still, the core message is clear: Malawi’s smallholder farmers are not passive recipients waiting for free advice. They are discerning customers who know which services they value, how they want to pay, and how they want to be reached, and any reform that ignores those preferences risks repeating the inefficiencies the cost-sharing model was designed to fix.

Subject of Research: Smallholder farmers' willingness to pay for cost-shared agricultural extension and advisory services in Malawi

Article Title: Smallholder farmers’ willingness to pay for agricultural extension and advisory services in Malawi: Case of Mzimba, Lilongwe, and Zomba districts

Article References: Jere, Z. M., Magombo, J. H., Chawinga, K., Mvula, W., Banda, S., Jere, M., Nkumba, S., Kamwambeni, S., & Nkhata, L. (2026). Smallholder farmers’ willingness to pay for agricultural extension and advisory services in Malawi: Case of Mzimba, Lilongwe, and Zomba districts. BMC Agriculture, 2(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-025-00027-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44399-025-00027-5

Keywords: Malawi, smallholder farmers, agricultural extension, willingness to pay, cost-sharing, contingent valuation, agricultural economics, food security, mobile money, extension policy, sub-Saharan Africa, farm advisory services