FINISH - Financial Inclusion Improves Sanitation and Health - is a joint undertaking of a wide range of actors that came together to address the challenges of micro finance, insurance and sanitation and health. The overall goal of the project itself is to built 1 million safe toilets (possibly sanitation systems), financed through microfinance loans. The FINISH project will test whether the use of microfinance for rural sanitation can be implemented at scale, in order to: accelerate access by the poor to demand-led sanitation, resulting in health, economic, and social impact; and greater sustainability in sanitation service delivery.

The actors involved are: Waste (Dutch sanitation and waste NGO), SNS Real (Dutch listed insurance-banking group), TATA-AIG LIFE Insurance Co Ltd, BISWA (Tier 1 Microfinance Institution in Orissa, India) and UNU/Merit (United Nations University, The Netherlands) - and the project has up to date 6 implementing microfinance institutions in a number of states in India.

The United Nations University (UNU/Merit) together with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS, UK) is responsible for the evaluation of the programme interventions; programme partners believe that the impact of sanitation on various levels including health, income, and general well being needs to be demonstrated at local levels and on a sufficient scale. For example, generally the rural poor do not yet regard sanitation as an income generating activity. Though, if their sanitation situation improves, their (sanitation related) health expenditures should decline and their free disposable income will increase. Such hypothesis will be tested through a rigorous impact evaluation study.

To verify the impact the UNU/Merit/IFS conducts a randomized control trial with three implementing agencies, implying an impact evaluation in three different states of India - Tamil Nadu in the South of India, Orissa in the East and Madhya Pradesh in the North.