A government constructed latrine in rural India

In 2011 Dean Spears, originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, left America to make India his home. Intriguingly, he chose Sitapur, a district in Uttar Pradesh, as his base. By then, his wife Diane Coffey, a professor and co-executive director of r.i.c.e., Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, was already working as a researcher in the country. "Both of us are demographers and have been studying children's health and human capital, which often means height, sanitation and social forces in Indian households and villages. So, to understand the problem first hand it was important for us to be in the heart of it," he says. The couple were particularly keen on looking at the problem of open defecation in rural India.