Global Handwashing Day – Water Currents

Global Handwashing Day – Water Currents, October 13, 2017

Global Handwashing Day is celebrated each year on October 15 to increase awareness and understanding around the importance of handwashing with soap as an easy, effective, and affordable way to prevent diseases and save lives. USAID recognizes washing hands with soap at critical times as a vital step in curbing the spread of diarrhea and respiratory illness, and promoting healthy growth.

Photo credits: Morgana Wingard/USAID (left) and Be Secure/USAID (right)

USAID works with vulnerable populations around the world who lack access to soap and water in the home and are often miles away from a safe and clean facility.

Join your soapy hands together to celebrate this year’s Global Handwashing Day theme, “Our Hands, Our Future.”

USAID handwashing efforts work toward a future where soap and water are accessible to every home and handwashing is a regular habit.

Events 
Interventions to Promote Handwashing and Sanitation Webinar. October 24, 2017. This Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) webinar will discuss the recent WSSCC/3ie systematic review, “Approaches to Promote Handwashing and Sanitation Behavior Change in Low and Middle Income Countries.”

Publications/Blogs
Handwashing Research. Water Currents, August 2017. This issue highlights recent handwashing studies including research in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, as well as studies on handwashing and infectious diseases, among other topics.

Read the complete issue.

Global Handwashing Day 2017 Planner’s Guide

Global Handwashing Day 2017 Planner’s Guide

Updated for 2017, this Planner’s Guide will help you plan a successful Global Handwashing Day event. 

From providing step-by-step instructions to easy-to-use tools, the Global Handwashing Day 2017 Planner’s Guide explores the importance of handwashing with soap and features:

Spotlights on current big ideas in handwashing, such as:

• the connection between hygiene and gender (pg. 17),
• the importance of handwashing for a healthy start (pg. 22), and
• the importance of sustaining handwashing with soap habits (pg. 29)
• Tools to help planners assess the impact of your campaign (pg. 52)
• Suggestions for promoting hygiene beyond October 15 (pg. 72)

The Global Handwashing Day 2017 Social Media Toolkit is also available, and in English, French & Spanish.

15 October was Global Handwashing Day: take the quiz!

Photo: IRC

Are you a Handwashing Champion?

Each year on 15 October, over 200 million people in over 100 countries celebrate Global Handwashing Day. Their aim is to increase awareness and understanding about the importance of handwashing with soap. This simple intervention is an effective and affordable way to prevent diseases and save lives. Promoting handwashing with soap reduces the risk of diarrhoea by at least 23% according to a 2014 systematic review of research. Handwashing with soap impacts more than just health: it is also beneficial for nutrition, education, economics, and equity.

Global Handwashing Day was founded by the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing, and is an opportunity to design, test, and replicate creative ways to encourage people to wash their hands with soap at critical times. This year’s theme is “Make Handwashing a Habit!” For handwashing to be effective it must be practised consistently at key times, such as after using the toilet or before contact with food. While habits must be developed over time, this theme emphasises the importance of handwashing as a ritual behaviour for long-term sustainability.

IRC is proud to be an affiliate member of the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing. Especially for Global Handwashing Day we created a fun quiz so that you can not only test your knowledge but also learn a bit about what we are doing to promote handwashing.

Don’t forget to visit the Global Handwashing Day website for resources and updates on  global handwashing promotion. For the latest research and developments, also check out the handwashing posts on Sanitation Updates.

Now take the quiz to see if you are a Handwashing Champion!

This blog was originally posted on the IRC website.

 

USAID – Celebrate Global Handwashing Day 2016!

USAID – Celebrate Global Handwashing Day 2016!

On Global Handwashing Day, we join partners around the world to celebrate the importance of handwashing with soap as an effective and affordable way to prevent diseases and save lives. Handwashing is an important part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) efforts to end preventable child and maternal deaths. 

Although many people around the world clean their hands with water, the use of soap is also necessary to prevent disease more effectively.

• Millions of children under the age of 5 years die from diarrheal diseases and pneumonia. Handwashing with soap could prevent about 1 out of every 3 episodes of diarrheal illnesses and almost 1 out of 6 episodes of respiratory infections like pneumonia.
• Handwashing with soap is also a key component of clean and safe birthing practices, which could save up to 40 percent of the 2.8 million infants that die during their first month of life.

USAID’s life-saving water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programs and other development activities promote adoption of handwashing and other hygiene practices as an important element of improved health and nutrition programs.

Learn more

• See how the Povu Poa is increasing handwashing in Kenya
• Listen to Robert Dreibelbis on Handwashing Behavior Change in Bangladesh
• Learn more about USAID’s work in water, sanitation, and hygiene
• Learn more about USAID’s maternal and child health efforts
• Read about USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program’s work to achieve clean clinics in Haiti

Photo credit: USAID

Not just another day

Global Handwashing Day is there to remind us of how simple the solutions to serious issues can be.

Global Handwashing Day is on the 15 October. Photograph: Concern Universal

I’ve always been a sceptic when it comes to world “Days”. However noble the cause, what difference can they really make? The International Day of Peace – as if the various factions in Syria or Nigeria’s Boko Haram extremists paused from their daily destruction to consider alternative approaches. How many acres of forest are cleared for extracting resources or planting cash-crops every World Environment Day? Aside from providing a hook for advocacy press releases, how could those involved possibly think that one day could positively affect the suffering on the front lines of poverty and insecurity? Well, having run behaviour change projects in West Africa over the last five years I am beginning to believe that it can.

Today is Global Handwashing Day, and together with its cousin World Toilet Day on 19 November, it brings attention to the most basic issues – hygiene and sanitation – that to our shame still account for two million child deaths a year.

A third of the world’s population – 2.4 billion people – live with poor sanitation and hygiene which, according to the World Bank, costs countries $260 billion annually. Every day 2,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday due to diarrhoeal diseases, the vast majority caused by poor sanitation and hygiene.

Diarrhoea alone killed far more young children in Nigeria over the last 12 months – around 150,000 – than Boko Haram’s slaughtering and the wars in Syria combined. Whilst we continue the daily search for even a hint of a resolution to these two brutal and complex conflicts, we already know the simple solution to tackling hygiene and sanitation-related diseases.

We know that handwashing with soap is the most effective and inexpensive way to prevent diarrhoeal diseases – reducing incidence by up to 47% – and combined with improved sanitation, this is boosted to 68%. We know that in countries with the highest child mortality rates as few as 1% of people wash their hands effectively, and that the global average is only 19%. Most frustratingly, effective tools and participatory methods are readily available and it is estimated that interventions that promote handwashing could save close to a million lives. So why is hygiene promotion not a focus of most development projects?

Read the full article in the WSSCC partner zone on the Guardian.

WASHplus Weekly: Focus on Global Handwashing Day 2015

Issue 209 | Oct. 9, 2015 | Focus on Global Handwashing Day 2015

• Print Version

Global Handwashing Day occurs each year on October 15. It is a global advocacy day dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding about the importance of handwashing with soap as an effective and affordable way to prevent diseases and save lives. This issue contains links to handwashing resources from WASHplus, the Global-Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing, recent studies, reports, and videos.  

RESOURCES

Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing (PPPHW)
This coalition of international stakeholders works explicitly to promote handwashing with soap and recognize hygiene as a pillar of international development and public health. Just a few of the partnership’s resources include the PPPHW website with links to webinars, fact sheets, andmember organizations. Also the Global Handwashing Day Social Media Toolkit features sample messages, blog ideas, and resources to help celebrants and handwashing champions spread the word about Global Handwashing Day.

WASHplus RESOURCES

Small Doable Actions: A Feasible Approach to Behavior Change Learning Brief, 2015. Link
A small doable action is a behavior that, when practiced consistently and correctly, will lead to personal and public health improvement. It is considered feasible by the householder, from HIS/HER point of view, considering the current practice, the available resources, and the particular social context. This brief takes a look at how WASHplus has applied this approach to a range of activities—handwashing, water treatment, improved sanitation, menstrual hygiene management, and food hygiene.

Handwashing and the Science of Habit, 2014. Webinar
This webinar features panelists David Neal, Catalyst Behavioral Sciences; The University of Miami; Jelena Vujcic, Catalyst Behavioral Sciences; The University of Buffalo; Orlando Hernandez, WASHplus, FHI360 and Wendy Wood, The University of Southern California.

Global Handwashing Day Planner’s Guide, 3rd Edition

Global Handwashing Day Planner’s Guide, 3rd Edition. 2014.

• Full text 
  

In addition to background information, the top five facts about handwashing you should know, and insights from the latest in handwashing research, the Planner’s Guide features:

• Detailed celebration ideas designed to help religious organizations, schools, healthcare centers and more plan effective messaging and events.
• An event checklist that helps planners organize and make sure their event planning is on track.
• Spotlights on:
  • Sustainability (p. 17)
  • Small Doable Actions (p. 20)
  • Social Norms (p. 22)
• And much more!

Global Handwashing Day celebrates 5th anniversary on 15 October

Global Handwashing Day is a global celebration of handwashing with soap involving over 200 million people in over 100 countries worldwide

In 2012, Global Handwashing Day will share its 5th anniversary with over 121 million children who are also celebrating their 5th birthday this year. Handwashing with soap can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea among children under five by almost 50 per cent, and respiratory infections by nearly 25 per cent. That’s why this year’s theme is “Help More Children Reach Their 5th Birthday”.

Logos, guidelines and information packs can be downloaded from the Global Handwashing Day website. There is a promotional Twitter/Facebook game called “World Wash Up”. The official Twitter hashtag for Global Handwashing Day is #iwashmyhands

Web site: globalhandwashing.org/ghw-day

The “World WASH UP” game created by Periscopic for the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing (PPPHW)

Global Handwashing Day: 200 million lather up for clean hands

More than 200 million schoolchildren, parents, teachers, celebrities and government officials in 80 countries lathered up in the third annual Global Handwashing Day on 15 October 2010. This year’s celebrations revolved around schools and children, and the theme “more than just a day“ aimed to make the simple, life-saving practice of washing hands a regular habit.

To ensure that efforts go far beyond one single day, the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap launched several tools including a “100 School Survey” questionnaire, a monitoring toolkit, the More than Just a Day brochure, and the “Get Bubbly” children’s game.

Kenya: school children attempt to break world handwashing record

School children at Thirime primary school, Kikuyu, Kenya on Global Handwashing Day. Photo: Thomas Mukoya-Reuters

Close to 20,000 school children and adults took part in a handwashing campaign in an attempt to establish a new Guinness World Record. They gathered at Thirime Primary School in Kikuyu on 15 October 2010 to mark Global Handwashing Day.

Education Permanent Secretary James Ole Kiyiapi announced that 19,352 people, including 18,302 children and 1,050 adults washed their hands during the event. If recognised, this would break the previous record for the most number of people washing hands at a single venue set by 15,150 students in Chennai, India, in 2009. Plan Bangladesh and partners claim to hold the record for the most number of people washing hands at multiple locations, when 52,970 school children gathered across the country in October 2009.