Communication for Hygiene and Sanitation
From SOUL BEAT AFRICA - where communication and media are central to AFRICA's social and economic development
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Recognising the impact of sanitation on public health, poverty reduction, economic and social development, and the environment, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. This issue of The Soul Beat looks at how communication can contribute to health by supporting activities that address sanitation. It offers programme experiences, evaluations, strategic thinking documents, and resource materials that highlight how communication can help raise awareness and promote behaviours that lead to the maintenance of safe water supplies, handwashing, and other hygienic practices.
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1. Ethiopia Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Movement - Ethiopia
The goal of this project is to contribute to the reduction of morbidity and mortality caused by lack of safe and adequate water, as well as poor sanitation and hygienic practices. The objectives are to promote improved water, sanitation, and hygiene, and gain the political and social commitment and endorsement required to make a difference in the country’s water, sanitation, and hygiene situation. Campaign activities include multi-media messages, working with the media, and facilitating opportunities for advocacy.
Contact Michael Negash michaeln@wateraidet.org OR info@wateraidet.org
2. Ghana Public-Private Partnership to Promote Handwashing with Soap - Ghana
This initiative sought to reduce morbidity and mortality among children under 5 years old through an integrated communication campaign promoting hand washing with soap to prevent diarrhoeal diseases. The 2-year campaign, led by the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) in Ghana, ran from 2003 to 2005. The communication strategy, which had the slogan "For Truly Clean Hands, Always Wash with Soap", involved: mass media; direct consumer contact; a district level programme conducted through schools, health centres, and communities; and a public relations and advocacy component.
Contact Nana A. Garbrah-Aidoo handwash@ghana.com OR Public-Private Partnership to Promote Handwashing with Soap eparra@worldbank.org AND info@wsp.org
3. Child-to-Child Sanitation Clubs - Mozambique
This project, initiated by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in the outlying areas of Beira City in Central Mozambique, aims to raise awareness about the importance of proper sanitation and hygiene among school children, teachers, and parents. It uses peer education within sanitation clubs to complement the building of infrastructure, such as latrines and hand-washing facilities. Older youth between the ages of 17-24 were trained as facilitators to spread the message about the importance of sanitation and hygiene to schoolchildren through various interactive and participatory methods like song, dance, theatre, and games.
Contact UNICEF maputo@unicef.org
4. Through Children's Eyes - Uganda
This project, initiated by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), involved participatory field research with children on urban environmental issues. The project involved 3 groups of children between the ages of 9 and 12, in 3 different parishes in IDRC’s Focus Cities Research Initiative project community in Uganda: Bwaise, Makerere-II, and Kasubi. More than 60 drawings were produced in all. The field research found that with the exception of Kasubi, the parish least affected by serious environmental problems, the themes were remarkably similar: sanitation, water quality, health issues, flooding, and loss of personal possessions and homes because of flooding.
Contact International Development Research Centre upe@idrc.ca
5. Diorano-WASH - Madagascar
The overarching aim of the Diorano-Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) initiative, launched in 2002 by the WASH Coalition in Madagascar, is to reduce poverty by addressing the issues of water supply, sanitation, and hygiene. The premise of the Diorano-WASH initiative was that solely providing water supply services would not lead to substantial health improvements or poverty alleviation without an equivalent focus on sanitation and hygiene behaviour. For this reason a large advocacy and awareness-raising effort was developed to complement the supply of water and sanitation infrastructure. Different campaigns were developed which involved schools, health centres, and the general public. They used photography, theatre, radio drama, mass media, and interpersonal communication to promote messages related to washing hands, the use of latrines, and safeguarding water supplies.
Contact Jean Herivelo Rakotondrainibe herivelo2@blueline.mg OR Lovy Hervet Rasolofomanana walovy@blueline.mg
6. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) Training in Ethiopia - Ethopia
This sanitation programme, developed by Plan Ethiopia in 2007, was designed to promote good sanitation behaviour and eliminate the practice of open defecation in Fura Kebele village in Ethiopia. The project utilised community led total sanitation (CLTS) - an approach that aims to mobilise communities to identify their problems and work out their own solutions to improving sanitation and hygiene behaviour. Communities also develop their own slogans to promote good sanitation practices as well as their own enforcement methods.
Contact feedback@plan-international.org
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For more information on the International Year of Sanitation (IYS) 2008, visit the IYS website
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7. A Tale of Two Villages: Lessons from Two Water Supply, Sanitation, and Health Education Schemes in North Gondar, Ethiopia
This 11-page report, published by WaterAid Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Development and Inter-Church Aid Commission (EOC-DICAC), is an evaluation of two water supply, sanitation, and hygiene education projects (WSSHEP) undertaken 7 years prior to the evaluation in two villages in Northern Ethiopia. The evaluation revealed that the two interventions have had vastly different outcomes over the 7 year period. One village, Atsede Mariam, has used the management of their water scheme to fund a range of independently-conceived community development projects, while the other village, Bohoma, has allowed their scheme to fall into a state of disrepair and to become a source of conflict.
8. The Colour of Change: Innovation, Motivation and Sustainability in Hygiene and Sanitation Work
by Polly Mathewson and Manyahlshal Ayele
This report is a case study of the Ethiopian Achefer Woreda Water Supply, Hygiene, and Sanitation programme, implemented by the Organisation for Rehabilitation and Development in Amhara (ORDA), and supported by WaterAid (WAE). The report is based on a 4-day visit to the project by a joint WAE-ORDA team in December 2006, 4 months before the project was due to be handed over to the community. The report suggests that certain elements might have helped to make Achefer a success: the unique combination of circumstances and approaches in terms of the ORDA/WAE partnership and the project's position in relation to other work in the region; the small, grassroots staffing model; and the holistic nature of the project components.
9. Behavioural Indicators of Household Decision-Making and Demand for Sanitation and Potential Gains from Sanitation Marketing in Ghana
by Marion W. Jenkins and Beth Scott
This 26-page report documents a survey conducted in Ghana to assess demand and decision-making around sanitation as well as identify strategies for sanitation marketing. Motivating and constraining factors are compared at each stage of adoption (of sanitation) and strategies likely to increase toilet installation in Ghana are discussed. According to the report, recognising where and how marketing can affect household sanitation decisions is the first of several challenges for sanitation managers wanting to use marketing approaches to increase demand for and access to improved sanitation. This study uses a model of household sanitation adoption decision-making that accounts for motivation, opportunity, and ability.
10. Can Hygiene be Cool and Fun? Insights from School Children in Senegal
This 12-page document, based on a research project conducted in primary schools in Dakar, Senegal, looked at the motivating factors for children to adopt hygienic hand-washing and toilet practices. The research aimed to inform the design of sanitation and hygiene programmes in schools. It suggests that relatively simple low-cost interventions can have far-reaching effects in improving children’s hygiene practices, if communicators take into account motivational factors and children’s sensitivities in relation to toilet practice and personal hygiene.
11. The Case for Marketing Sanitation
by Sandy Cairncross
This field note analyses the social marketing of sanitation – the hygienic disposal of human excreta – as an approach to stimulate the market for private sector suppliers. It describes and analyses projects and activities in water and sanitation that provide lessons for sector leaders, administrators, and individuals tackling the water and sanitation challenges in urban and rural areas. According to the document, "most progress in access has been achieved by the market – private suppliers supplying individual households. Marketing has been more successful than anything else in changing the behaviour of people when they can see direct personal benefits. The purpose of this field note is to explain the marketing."
12. Achieving the "Good Life": Why Some People Want Latrines in Rural Benin
by Marion W. Jenkins and Val Curtis
This report looks at consumer motivation for acquiring sanitation in rural Benin, and the implications for new messages and strategies to promote sanitation in developing countries. The paper argues that public health programmes to improve sanitation have consistently framed promotional messages in terms of faecal-oral disease prevention and largely fail to motivate changes in sanitation behaviour. The report documents a qualitative study conducted among 40 household heads. The study showed that risk of faecal-oral disease transmission was largely not a motivating factor for installing latrines, and that motivating drives had more to do with prestige, well-being, and situational goals.
13. Hygiene Centre ‘Tools for Schools’ Toolkit
To better understand the unique determinants of children's behaviour, the Hygiene Centre has been working on developing a set of tools which are tailored to create effective communication with, and information elicitation from, children, especially in developing countries. The first "generation" of these tools were created by Myriam Sidibe, a Doctoral student in the Hygiene Centre, who studied the hygiene behaviour of school children in Senegal. Since then, the tools have been elaborated and modified through use in national surveys conducted in other sub-Saharan African countries, and more recently in Asia.
14. International Year of Sanitation Advocacy Kit
In order to encourage focused advocacy activities in the 2008 International Year of Sanitation (IYS), the United Nations (UN)-Water Task Force on Sanitation has prepared an advocacy and media kit in English, French, and Spanish. The task force, coordinated by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), hopes to raise awareness and promote sanitation because, at the current rate of progress, too many countries will not reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) sanitation target: to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation before 2026.
15. The Handwashing Handbook: A Guide for Developing a Hygiene Promotion Program to Increase Handwashing with Soap
by Parameswaran Iyer, Jennifer Sara, Valerie Curtis, Beth Scott, and Jason Cardosi
This handbook, produced by The Global Public Private Partnership for Handwashing, outlines an approach to the promotion of handwashing with soap. It is designed for staff in government and development organisations and decision-makers in ministries and funding agencies, who are either designing policies and programmes to improve public health, or carrying out handwashing programmes. It is based on and includes research on the prevention of diarrhoeal diseases in children.
16. Woreda Resource Book: Community-Led Total Behaviour Change in Hygiene and Sanitation
According to the authors, this 85-page guide is intended for use by those who would like to understand and undertake the “Whole System in a Room” approach to reaching total behaviour change in hygiene and sanitation in their own communities. The guide offers the basic tenets of a learning by doing approach, based on the experiences of the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) movement in Amhara district, Ethiopia.
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For a related previous issue of The Soul Beat see:
The Soul Beat 85 - Promoting Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene
The Soul Beat 68 - MDG #7 - Ensuring Environmental Sustainability
Click here to view archived editions of The Soul Beat Newsletter.
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