Governments, international agencies, and private organizations have invested heavily in sanitation improvements in Asia and globally in recent decades, though the benefits for vulnerable groups such as the poor, women, and children have yet to be systematically captured. There is also a need to better understand how to optimize sanitation services across households, taking into account prices, competition, and other supply-side factors.

ADBI, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies are seeking original empirical research papers on sanitation and development, to be presented during a workshop in Tokyo or online in October 2021. The papers will also be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the Journal of Development Economics or publication as ADBI working papers. Topics related to Asia and the Pacific are of particular interest and may include, but are not limited to:

• Sanitation’s socioeconomic impacts in areas such as health, education, gender, employment, and economic wellbeing
• Other downstream effects of sanitation on individual or household-level income, domestic migration patterns, and income disparities
• Demand for sanitation, including responses to sanitation incentives and adoption of sanitation facilities
• Social and economic spillover effects of sanitation
• The sanitation network system market, including competition among company suppliers, bidding, auction, and sewered vs. non-sewered sanitation
• Challenges in sanitation services delivery to poor households in urban and rural areas
• The role of technology such as mobile payment systems in improving sanitation access and delivery
• Other topics related to the economics of sanitation

Authors should submit their full papers in English via this link by 1 August 2021. 

Authors of selected papers will be invited to present during the October 2021 workshop. Should conditions allow the workshop to be conducted in Tokyo, ADBI will provide travel support to one author per paper. The author must be a citizen of an ADB member economy.