World Water Day

22/03/17

Today is World Water Day. This international initiative aims at raising attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources, and it is the ideal opportunity to set our 3ie/WSSCC Campbell systematic review on handwashing and sanitation promotional approaches in the picture. In this mixed method systematic review, we identified 42 quantitative studies on the effect of promotional approaches on behaviour change, and 28 qualitative studies on factors influencing implementation of such programmes. We concluded that there was not one single promotional approach which worked better, but many promising promotional elements were identified, e.g. working in a community-based way may be effective in terms of handwashing with soap and sanitation outcomes. For community-based approaches, we found several factors influencing implementation of the approach, e.g. the implementer being part of the community, gender of the implementer, developing a culture of cooperation,... Detailed findings of our systematic review will soon be published in The Campbell Library, and a summary review on the 3ie website (protocol can be found here). Last Monday, we presented our findings at the Sustainable Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Software Workshop at the IFRC office in Geneva, so that our findings can be incorporated in IFRC’s revised software tool.”