Willingness to pay for improved solid waste management services and associated factors among urban households: One and one half bounded contingent valuation study in Bahir Dar city, Ethiopia

Households which are the primary producers of solid waste and suffer from the effects of uncollected solid waste should be able to participate in improving SWM. Accordingly, the contribution of urban dwellers on SWM service plays a great role for better improvement of SWM at the community. Therefore, this study aims to estimate households' willingness to pay for improved solid waste management services and analyze its determinant using binary logit econometrics model. A total of 350 randomly selected households were interviewed to address the objective of this study. The study was used both descriptive and econometrics analysis. Finally, the survey result indicated that 86.3% of sample households were willing to pay for improved solid waste management services. Following this, the one and one half bounded contingent valuation result revealed that the mean willingness to pay is 13.10 ETB[Money official Exchange rate of 1$ = 31.45 Ethiopian Birr (ETB)]/month with the total willingness to pay of 494587ETB/month which is much higher than the amount of money collected by Bahir Dar city municipality (335,000 ETB/month). Additionally, the model result demonstrated that educational level of the household, monthly aggregate income, and quantity of waste generated per week, access to solid waste management services and respondents' responsibility on solid waste management had significant positive effect on households' willingness to pay unlike sex of household head and number of children in the household. The municipality of Bahir Dar city should consider these significant variables to design and implement improved solid waste management services.