Moderator of 1 Session
Presenter of 1 Presentation
USING CHOICE MODELLING TO IDENTIFY POPULAR AND AFFORDABLE ALTERNATIVE INTERVENTIONS FOR SCHISTOSOMIASIS IN UGANDA (ID 249)
Abstract
Introduction
We examined community preferences for interventions that would improve sanitation and access to safe water in rural Uganda, in the specific context of mitigating transmission of, and individual exposure to, Schistosoma mansoni. We collected choice data from households in three remote littoral villages in the Mayuge district of Uganda.
Methods
This study used a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to investigate preferences for two types of WASH interventions. DCEs elicit community preferences by presenting participants with a series of hypothetical interventions and asking them to select their most preferred, from the discrete set of alternatives. Typical to these surveys, each intervention bundle comes at a cost to the individual. As such, we are able to elicit how respondents make trade-offs between the interventions’ presented benefits and the associated incurred cost. All respondents saw two sets of choice cards which related to 1) behaviours that put oneself at risk (RTS) and 2) behaviours that put others at risk (RTO). This enabled us to compare and contrast the value that local people put on improvements to these two different domains of risk and compare WTP and WTW for the two intervention types.
Results
Findings show that the most popular WASH-based interventions were those reducing RTS. This was followed by interventions aimed at reducing RTOs.
Conclusions
This is the first paper to explore preferences for two types of interventions to combat S. mansoni infection and transmission in rural Uganda. We find that respondents were keen for change and were willing to pay and work for new WASH interventions which would reduce health risks both to themselves (in the RTS scenarios) and to others (in the RTO scenarios).