What Drives Residents to Join Environmental Sanitation Programmes in Nigerian Town

In a fast-urbanising secondary town in southwestern Nigeria, the success or failure of environmental sanitation programmes ultimately rests on a single question: will residents show up? A new study from Bowen University in Iwo, Nigeria, has taken that question seriously, examining in detail why the people of Owo Town in Ondo State do, or do not, participate in environmental sanitation exercises that are central to public health and sustainable urban management across the country. The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability, combines a large descriptive survey with a sophisticated statistical technique known as Principal Component Analysis to reveal the hidden structure behind residents’ engagement, and its conclusions may reshape how sanitation campaigns are designed not only in Nigeria but in rapidly growing towns across sub-Saharan Africa.

Led by Modupe Mulikat Ologunagba and Timothy Oyebamiji Ogunbode of the Environmental Management and Crop Production Unit at Bowen University’s College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science, the study was guided by the Health Belief Model, a well-established behavioural framework that seeks to explain why individuals take, or fail to take, protective health actions. The model posits that behaviour is shaped by perceptions of susceptibility to a threat, the perceived severity of that threat, the perceived benefits of acting, the perceived barriers to action, and internal or external cues that trigger behaviour. Applied to sanitation, the framework suggests that residents’ willingness to participate in communal clean-up exercises depends less on abstract civic duty and more on whether they believe poor sanitation genuinely threatens their health, whether they perceive real benefits from participating, and whether practical obstacles stand in their way.

The research team adopted a descriptive survey design, administering questionnaires to 520 residents of Owo Town. Of these, 500 were returned in valid form for analysis, an exceptionally high response rate of 96.2 percent that lends considerable weight to the findings. The questionnaire captured information on respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics, including gender, age, educational attainment and occupation, as well as their patterns of participation in environmental sanitation programmes. The resulting dataset was subjected to two complementary analytical approaches: descriptive statistics, which profiled the study population and their reported behaviours, and Principal Component Analysis, a dimension-reduction technique that identifies underlying factors explaining patterns of correlation among many individual survey variables.

The descriptive results painted a detailed portrait of the study population. Women constituted 55.8 percent of respondents, a majority that reflects both the demographic realities of the town and, arguably, the prominent role women often play in household and community environmental management. Respondents with tertiary education accounted for 64.6 percent of the study population, indicating that the surveyed participants were, on the whole, highly educated relative to broader regional averages. Participation patterns varied across these socio-demographic categories, with different levels of engagement reported among men and women, among different age groups, and among people of different occupational and educational backgrounds. Yet, crucially, the authors are careful to note a significant methodological limitation: the socio-demographic characteristics were examined descriptively only, and no inferential statistical tests were conducted to determine whether the observed associations between these characteristics and participation were statistically significant. In other words, the study cannot claim with confidence that, for example, women or the university-educated are inherently more likely to participate; it can only describe what patterns appeared in the sample.

That restraint makes the study’s central analytical finding all the more important. Rather than pointing to who the participants are, the analysis points to what drives them. Before factor analysis could proceed, the researchers verified that the dataset was statistically suitable for the task, and the results were emphatic. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy, a statistic that indicates the proportion of variance among variables that might be common variance, reached 0.884, a value well above the conventional 0.6 threshold and indicative of excellent sampling adequacy. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity, which tests whether the correlation matrix is an identity matrix and thus unsuitable for extracting factors, produced a test statistic of 8969.801 with 946 degrees of freedom, significant at p < 0.001. Together, these diagnostics confirmed that the relationships among the survey variables were strong enough to justify factor extraction, and that the resulting components would be meaningful rather than artefacts of noise.

Principal Component Analysis extracted three principal dimensions associated with residents’ engagement in environmental sanitation programmes in Owo Town, and each tells a distinct part of the story. The first dimension, awareness and information dissemination, captured the degree to which residents knew about sanitation programmes, understood their purpose, and received information through public channels. The highest loading variable within this dimension registered at 0.845, indicating that awareness-related items contributed very strongly to this component. In the language of the Health Belief Model, this dimension corresponds to the cues to action and perceived threat that motivate protective behaviour: people cannot respond to a health risk they do not perceive, and they cannot join a programme they have not heard about.

The second and strongest dimension was community engagement and enforcement, with its highest loading variable reaching 0.915, the single most powerful loading in the entire analysis. This component reflects the institutional and social fabric of sanitation participation: whether communities organise themselves around clean-up exercises, whether local enforcement mechanisms encourage compliance, and whether collective norms sustain individual commitment. The finding resonates with a large body of social science showing that collective action problems, such as maintaining shared environmental quality, are most effectively solved when social pressure and legitimate enforcement operate together. In Owo Town, it appears that the machinery of community mobilisation and the credibility of enforcement are decisive in determining whether residents translate awareness into action.

The third dimension, infrastructural and financial barriers, carried a highest loading of 0.688. This component speaks to the practical constraints that the Health Belief Model describes as perceived barriers: the absence of adequate waste collection infrastructure, the cost of proper waste disposal, and the financial burden that participation can impose on households. Even the most motivated resident cannot participate meaningfully in a sanitation exercise if there are no functioning disposal sites, no collection services, and no affordable means of managing waste. This dimension links the study directly to the infrastructure gap that characterises many secondary towns in Nigeria, where urbanisation has outpaced the provision of sanitation services.

Taken together, the three dimensions suggest that residents’ engagement in environmental sanitation is linked to behavioural awareness, institutional practices, community enforcement and infrastructural conditions, rather than being explained by socio-demographic characteristics alone. This is a subtle but consequential conclusion for policy. Many sanitation programmes in developing countries are targeted demographically, on the assumption that certain age groups, genders or education levels are the key to participation. The Owo Town findings suggest instead that programme designers should focus on the information, institutional and infrastructural environment that surrounds all residents, since these are the factors that structure behaviour across demographic categories.

The study arrives at a moment when the stakes of urban sanitation could hardly be higher. Nigeria’s secondary towns are growing rapidly as migration reshapes the country’s settlement pattern, and environmental sanitation remains a cornerstone of public health defence against the diseases that thrive where waste goes unmanaged. Poor sanitation contributes to the transmission of cholera, typhoid and a range of parasitic infections, and the burden falls disproportionately on children and the poor. At the international level, Sustainable Development Goal 6 commits nations to ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, and community participation is widely recognised as indispensable to achieving that target. The Bowen University study contributes to this agenda by applying rigorous behavioural theory to a context, the rapidly urbanising secondary town, that is often overlooked in favour of megacities.

The authors’ recommendations flow directly from their findings. They call for sustained public enlightenment campaigns to keep awareness high and to act as recurring cues to action, for community-based sanitation initiatives that harness the powerful community engagement and enforcement dimension, for improved infrastructural investment to dismantle the financial and physical barriers that frustrate willing participants, for transparent enforcement strategies that build rather than erode public trust, and for participatory monitoring frameworks that give residents a genuine stake in evaluating and improving sanitation governance. Each recommendation maps onto one of the three extracted components, giving the study a practical coherence that policy-makers can act upon.

The research also makes a methodological contribution worth noting. By pairing the Health Belief Model with Principal Component Analysis in a Nigerian secondary-town context, the authors demonstrate how behavioural theory and multivariate statistics can be combined to move beyond descriptive participation rates toward an actionable understanding of determinants. The exceptionally high response rate strengthens the representativeness of the survey, and the outstanding sampling adequacy statistics give confidence in the factor structure. At the same time, the authors’ transparency about the absence of inferential tests on socio-demographic associations is a model of scholarly candour, marking out precisely where future research should go: confirmatory work that tests whether the three dimensions operate differently across demographic groups, and longitudinal studies that track whether interventions targeting awareness, community enforcement and infrastructure actually raise participation over time.

For the people of Owo Town, the message of the research is ultimately an empowering one. Participation in environmental sanitation is not determined by who residents are but by what surrounds them: whether they are informed, whether they are organised, and whether the infrastructure exists for their effort to matter. Those are conditions that policy can change, and the study provides the evidence base for doing so.