  We study the effectiveness of a community-level information intervention
aimed at improving sanitation using a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT)
in Nigerian communities. The intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation
(CLTS), is currently part of national sanitation policy in more than 25
countries. While average impacts are exiguous almost three years after
implementation at scale, the results hide important heterogeneity: the
intervention has strong and lasting effects on sanitation practices in poorer
communities. These are realized through increased sanitation investments. We
show that community wealth, widely available in secondary data, is a key
statistic for effective intervention targeting. Using data from five other
similar randomized interventions in various contexts, we find that
community-level wealth heterogeneity can rationalize the wide range of impact
estimates in the literature. This exercise provides plausible external validity
to our findings, with implications for intervention scale-up. JEL Codes: O12,
I12, I15, I18.
