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You name it! Your hygiene promotion activities need to be fun, participatory and to answer to people needs and expectations. In one hand people should understand by themselves – through participatory activities – the links between hygiene and health; and in another hand, you need to use adapted communication techniques – inspired by marketing, and making it “social marketing” – to push the people to change their behaviour.

Identifying risk practices

Firstly you need to understand the epidemiological data through different kind of assessments in order to understand the causes of these diseases and identify the risk practices – which you’ll target during your hygiene promotion campaigns. Here follows some assessments that could be organized prior to the planning of hygiene promotion activities – you’ll plan and organize these activities function of the time and resources available:

• Interviews: such as Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices survey; Individual or Household interviews; Focus Groups Discussions; etc.

• Transect walk: accompanied by community members, walk through the community following a more or less straight line, and identify possible risk practices for example in household yards (i.e. uncovered water storage) or around WASH facilities (i.e. no fence around the water point). Discuss it with your guides.

• Mapping exercise: community members draw a map of their village or neighbourhood on the ground (using materials such as stones, leaves) or on a flip chart, representing any relevant features (i.e. settlements, roads, flooded area, WASH facilities). This exercise could be combined to others ones (such as transect walk, interviews) to identify risk practices and possible solutions.

• Sanitary survey: you design a questionnaire focussed on a specific issue (i.e. water point) to identify the risk practices and contamination risks.

• Ranking and scoring, Pocket charts and Sanitation ladders: on a simple matrix, community members indicate their preferences – anonymously or not – regarding any kind of WASH related topics.

Hygiene promotion key messages

The activities listed above help you to identify the key messages that the hygiene promotion needs to spread. However, during emergency response, when the living conditions are degraded and that access to WASH facilities is compromised the 3 key messages are:

• Wash your hands with soap at critical times;

• Drink and protect potable water;

• Use and maintain toilet.

You have to make sure that the required WASH facilities are available, accessible and maintained in order to put in practice these hygienic practices.

Then, as explained above, the situation needs to be evaluated to make sure that we spread the right messages the right way and that people don’t be ashamed.

For example, in Syria (urban and rural), where the level of education is very high and people used to have correct hygiene practices, the sudden collapse of the living conditions increased the risks of WASH related diseases, and many affected people were exposed to ‘forgotten’ diseases, including the leishmaniosis spread by the sand fly. Thus, even if the hygiene promotion key messages were known, it had to be reminded especially amongst children.

Another example is in Mongolia (urban and rural), where, during the harsh winter WASH diseases are invisible in spite of poor hygienic practices; but they are showing up in spring and summer. The challenge was to adapt the hygiene promotion messages to the situation and to find the appropriate communication channels. Thus, youth clubs were established in schools and rather than saying to the pupils that “hand washing would block the spread of diseases” (kids would say, “I never wash my hands and I never get sick” which was right during winter) the message would be “using soap will give a nice smell to your hands and your friends will be jealous”.

Resources

The spread of hygiene promotion key messages could be done using conventional communication channels (i.e. leaflets, TV, radio, megaphones), during special event day (i.e. world water, sanitation, hand washing days) and throughout the year using games, role plays, fun scientific experiments, etc. The following links will guide you towards websites where lots of hygiene promotion activities are listed and drawings can be downloaded. Always remember to adapt the activities to the context where you’re working and that local teachers, health educators and community mobilisers can help you to design activities.

CAWST developed lots of resources for hygiene promotion, in many languages and for many different context. Explore their posters, activities and videos: https://resources.cawst.org/posters_activities_and_videos

An amazing Visual Aid Library of Information Education Communication (IEC) materials developed by the WASH cluster throughout the world. You’ll find guidelines, activities and images for many different activities and contexts: https://ceecis.org/washtraining/index.html

Rod Shaw developed for WEDC a library of WASH drawings that could be adapted by a local artist to the context where you’re working in: https://wedc-knowledge.lboro.ac.uk/resources/e/dw/contents.pdf

Finally, the IFRC gathered lots of materials to implement hygiene promotion in emergencies: guidelines, activities, posters, images, videos: https://watsanmissionassistant.wikispaces.com/Software+hygiene+promotion