The BRAC WASH programme in Bangladesh has produced a new handwashing promotion video. It shows slides of handwashing promotion sessions for different groups (children, adolescent girls, women, men), as well as for schools, village WASH committees and mosques (imams).
The video was released on 5 May to coincide with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) annual global campaign to promote better hand hygiene in health care.
Posted in Campaigns and Events, Hygiene Promotion, South Asia
Tagged Bangladesh, BRAC, BRAC WASH II programme, handwashing, videos
Watch BBC presenter Dallas Campbell help unclog a sewer in Mexico City in the BBC programme Supersized Earth. It ain’t pleasant.
Mass media campaign with loudspeaker rickshaw, Bangladesh. Photo: Eawag
Evidenced-based methods are more cost effective than traditional NGO awareness raising approaches to ensure sustained behaviour change in the WASH sector, says environmental psychologist Prof. Hans-Joachim Mosler.
Prof. Mosler
Two of his presentations on evidence-based behaviour change are now available online. An accompanying guideline for behaviour change [1] was published in June 2012.
Mosler begins his first presentation with examples of failed sanitation and water projects. What they have in common is that they focus on hardware and neglect behaviour change. In one striking study, the construction of new school latrines actually increased health risks among girls because hygiene behaviour did not improve [2].
Wherever the Need has produced a simple, but effective sanitation promotion video narrated by Baroness Glenys Kinnock. Wherever the Need is a small UK-based charity with projects in India, Kenya and Sierra Leone.
Their latest activity is the introduction of income-generating ecosan toilets in rural Tamil Nadu, India. The state government is providing 50% subsidy for each ecosan toilet.
You will not see any real poo in the two short films that won the 2012 Golden Poo Awards today. A relief for those who find the sight of the real thing offensive, but unlikely a prime concern of the 2.6 billion who have no relief from open defecation.
The “Number One” Golden Poo Award went to Andrew Oxley for Men, Loos and Number Twos.
Paul Rey-burns won the “Number Two” award for his film Pushing4Change.
The winning films will form part of the Global Handwashing Day (October 15th) and World Toilet Day (November 19th) awareness-raising campaigns. The films will be also screened amongst the programme of films at The London Short Film Festival (4-13 January 2013) .
Sanitation Updates’ favourite to win the 2012 Golden Poo Award for best short film has to be Bum Bay. Set to the tune of the 1969 Indo-pop hit “Bombay Meri Hai” – transformed to “Bum Bay Meri Hai” – we see a mock tourist promotion film interspersed with explicit scenes of male open defecation.
The film was made by renowned Indian film advertising company Genesis run by Prahlad Kakar. Continue reading
Vidya Balan, who received the Best Actress National Film Award for her role in 2011 Bollywood hit ‘The Dirty Picture’, will now play a role to alter the real dirty picture in India. Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh has named the Bollywood actress as the brand ambassador in his campaign for improving sanitation [1].
According to India’s 2011 census, nearly half of population have no toilet at home, but more people own a mobile phone [2]. There are 2.1 million toilets in India which rely on manual scavengers to empty them [1].
The Minister hopes that Balan can help turn his campaign to end open defecation into a national obsession:
“it is going to be a very serious commitment on her part – she’s had a dirty picture in reel life, but this will be a clean picture in real life”. [1]
Still from Disney short film "Cleanliness Brings Health"
In the 1940s, the Walt Disney Studios produced a series of educational films on sanitation and hygiene promotion for developing countries. The films, in the Health for the Americas series, were aimed at Latin America. They were commissioned by the now defunct Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), which was later renamed Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA).
This new film shows how composting toilets are helping to address the serious water issues facing Tuvalu.
The tiny Pacific island nation of just 10,500 inhabitants, recently experienced a devastating drought. Existing septic tank systems are polluting the groundwater and destroying the reefs in lagoons, forcing fishermen to spend more on fuel to travel further away to catch fish.
The Global Environment Facility supported Pacific Integrated Water Resources Management project (GEF Pacific IWRM) is working to address these problems by installing composting toilets on the main island of Funafuti. Composting toilets use almost no water and produce compost that so families can plant their own vegetables, making them less dependent on expensive food imports.
Alana Potter, lead author of the WASHCost working paper on “Assessing hygiene cost-effectiveness“, explains the importance of changing hygiene behaviours so that improved water and sanitation can lead to the expected health benefits. She has been reviewing indicators, tools and methods that sector institutions are using to monitor and measure hygiene behaviour change and identified three key hygiene behaviours common to all of these tools. Simply put, these are hand washing, using a toilet (i.e. separation of faeces from users) and safe management of household water. These are crucial for health benefits to be derived from improved water and should be remembered on World Water Day.
Interview and video by Nicolas Dickinson, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
March 21, 2012
Source: IRC / WASHCost, 21 Mar 2012
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