Willingness to pay for toilets among students of Makerere University: a case study of School of Statistics and Planning

Abstract

This report presents a full account of the study carried out to assess the willingness to pay for toilet facilities among students of Makerere University, a case study of School of Statistics and Planning. The main objective of the study was to find out whether students at the school are willing to pay for toilet facilities. The study also aimed at finding out the relationship between student’s willingness to pay according to sex, year of study, course offered, residence, knowledge about toilet facilities, location of nearest clean facilities and dissatisfaction with existing facilities. In order to achieve the above objectives a well-structured questionnaire was administered to the population of interest. The data obtained from the respondents was entered using Microsoft Excel and analysed using STATA. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate data analysis tools of frequency tables, cross tabulations and logistic regression were used respectively. The study results revealed that willingness to pay for toilet facilities among the students at the School of Statistics and Planning was low (47.4%) and the most stated reasons being that the students believe it is a service that the university is supposed to provide since they pay tuition and that the students do not believe that the funds collected can be put to the right use by the university. The study results also showed that the factors affecting willingness to pay for toilet facilities at School of Statistics and Planning that were significant included the sex of the student, year of study of the student, the number of times the students uses existing facilities, the student’s knowledge about the diseases caused by poor sanitation and maintenance of facilities, the location of the nearest clean facilities and the dissatisfaction with the number and sanitation of the existing facilities. I recommend that the university carry out further research concerning the condition of the existing sanitary facilities not only at school of Statistics and Planning but in the entire university and for those schools where the facilities are few and poorly maintained a solution should be found to improve the University’s sanitation as a whole.