Water, Sanitation and Hygiene – Page 2

National Social and Behaviour Change Communication Strategy for Integrated Early Childhood Development, Nutrition and WASH 2018 – 2024 (Government of Rwanda, 2018)

February 22, 2019

The National SBCC Strategy will build on the integration of Early Children Development, Nutrition and WASH sectors which provides opportunities of benefiting from integrated ECD, nutrition and WASH social behavior and communication services aiming at improving knowledge, attitude and practices at community and household levels.

This strategy seeks to address key determinants related to early children development, malnutrition and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) mostly related to knowledge, attitude and practices at community and individual levels. There are many impediments within the health systems that prevent people from having productive and healthy lives. Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) addresses key barriers preventing people from adopting improved health practices. The Early Children Development, nutrition and WASH sectors within the health system can benefit positively from an SBCC strategy.

ECD, Nutrition and WASH have multi-sectoral dimensions that require contributions from different disciplines including but not limited to agriculture, economic strengthening, public health, gender, medicine, and social science. The theories and models fromthese different domains can be extracted to develop and deliver effective behavior change communications particularly in the context of promoting positive ECD, nutritional and WASH related practices at household and community level in Rwanda. By addressing key barriers related to ECD, Nutrition and WASH by promoting Community and Household integrated best practices, this will ensure optimum health status of the population of Rwanda.

Engaging Community Members to Adopt Effective WASH Practices for Nutrition (SPRING brief, 2017)

February 18, 2019

The first 1,000 days, the period from pregnancy to two years of age, are critical for early childhood development. During this time, children are especially vulnerable to stunting, an irreversible condition that can result in lifelong cognitive and physical deficits. In 2011, stunting, or low height-for-age, affected more than 165 million children worldwide (Black et al. 2013). Mounting evidence indicates that poor water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) practices contribute significantly to stunting. Improving WASH practices reduces diarrheal disease, environmental enteric
dysfunction, and soil-transmitted helminth (parasitic worm) infections. Combined, these reductions contribute to decreases in stunting.

In Ghana, stunting is a particularly serious challenge. According to the 2014 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS), 19 percent of Ghanaian children under the age of 5 are stunted. Among the regions with the highest rates of stunting is the Northern Region, where the prevalence is 33 percent (GDHS 2014). WASH practices in many parts of the country contribute to this problem. The majority of households (93 percent) do not treat their drinking water by any method (GDHS 2014), while only 14 percent use an improved toilet facility that is not shared with other
households (GDHS 2014). In the two weeks preceding the 2014 GDHS survey, the overall rate of diarrhea reported among children under five was 12 percent, a figure which tends to vary seasonally.

The SPRING project is a seven-year USAID-funded cooperative agreement to strengthen global and country efforts to scale up high-impact nutrition practices and policies and improve maternal and child nutrition outcomes. SPRING has worked for three years in Ghana, where USAID has tasked it with helping to prevent stunting and reduce anemia in the Feed the Future Zone of Influence in 15 districts in the Upper East and Northern Regions.

SPRING’s “WASH 1,000” strategy promotes focused, evidence-based WASH behaviors to eliminate common fecal-oral contamination pathways in children during the first 1,000 days. The strategy takes an integrated, multi-sectoral approach, simultaneously delivering products, services, and information to households with pregnant and lactating women and those with children under two (i.e., 1,000-day households).

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Wumen Bagung – Communication for Development and Social Change Bulletin: “Whose Theory Counts?” (RMIT, 2018)

October 22, 2018

This edition of Wumen Bagung explores four key themes, each focused on how communication outcomes are influenced by the role of the community, and whether it is passive or active participant. The first theme brings together analyses from across Asia of different ways of communicating to local communities starting with a review of how water, hygiene and sanitation services are communicated in Cambodia, fresh approaches to communication underway in Myanmar by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the use of cable television in local Philippine communities.

The second theme – which details outside approaches to communication for development (C4D) – opens with Robert Boughen’s challenge for us to rethink Chinese media development investments, not from a neoliberal development perspective, rather through acknowledging that Chinese media assistance in Africa ‘has an active function in a cohesive model of the ‘development economy’. Edwar Hanna and Jackie Davies of C4D Network consider the effects of urbanisation on communication for development, while Sina Øversveen critically examines the Freedom of the Press Index.

The third theme focuses on the lessons to be learned from local communities by directly involving them in C4D. In ‘The Space Between’, Donna Griffin takes us on a journey of learning the Aboriginal way of understanding the world, while Winifredo Dagli reviews the learning development training offered by the University of Philippines Los Banos. Kylie Smith and Melissa Fan close this theme with an examination of C4D in the age of feminism.

The final theme provides examples of the community as leaders in communication and looks at how video is actively being used to interrogate local development challenges in India, followed by an analysis of public art as a critical tool in democratic communication.

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Engaging men and boys in sanitation and hygiene programmes (IDS Frontiers of CLTS: Innovations and Insights 11, 2018)

September 10, 2018

This issue of Frontiers of CLTS shares and builds on the learning from a desk study that explores examples of men’s and boys’ behaviours and
gender roles in sanitation and hygiene (S&H). Of particular interest is the extent to which the engagement of men and boys in S&H processes
is leading to sustainable and transformative change in households and communities and reducing gendered inequality.

The review focuses on men and boys: how to engage them (or not), how to mobilise them as allies in the transformation of S&H outcomes and the
problems they contribute to and experience.

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Engaging Participants in Community-based Research (SHARE Policy Brief, 2018)

May 31, 2018

SHARE, WASHTED and other WASH and health research partners collaborated to explore issues of trust around community-based research through a community dialogue event in Chikwawa, Southern Malawi. This policy brief outlines key recommendations provided by participants to improve community engagement. The brief is aimed at researchers, research institutions and policymakers.

While the research recommendations provided are based on findings from a community engagement event in rural Malawi, they are applicable to researchers working on community-based research in many low-income and rural contexts.

Click here for full brief.