Modalities
Could include:
- Improved sanitation facilities that are not shared with other households.
- Safe disposal of excreta in situ or transported and treated offsite.
- Availability of a handwashing facility on premises with soap and water.
- Rehabilitation or construction of improved family latrines (no flies, feces or odours) with hand–washing facilities.
- Distribution of family latrine maintenance kits (gloves, bucket, brush, shovel, small local pot for ash).
- Safe waste treatment and disposal.
- Soap at household level [450 grams per person per month].
- Hygiene or ‘Baby–WASH’ kits as part of IYCF support.
- Provision or construction (home–made) of handwashing kits like tippy–taps (eg, pierced can or bottle with soap in a net).
- Introducing community–friendly faecal sludge management through engagement with the government to ensure environmental hygiene.
- Transformative WASH programming is an approach to achieving comprehensive and safe WASH services and behaviours that adequately reduce exposure to harmful pathogens and provide safe environments that support good health, nutrition and well–being. While “transformative WASH” is not yet well defined, it is clear that it must be context–specific (ie, responding to local sociocultural, economic and environmental factors) and risk–based (ie, responding to local disease burden and transmission patterns).
- Community–led total sanitation (CLTS) with child centred messaging on nutrition and sanitation which mobilises communities to completely eliminate open defecation (OD).
Conditions and considerations
- Definitions for basic and safely managed sanitation services are defined as:
- Safely managed sanitation – use of improved sanitation facilities that are not shared with other households and where excreta are safely disposed of in situ or transported and treated offsite.
- Basic sanitation – use of improved facilities that are not shared with other households.
- Basic hygiene – availability of a handwashing facility on premises with soap and water.
- Area–wide coverage of sanitation services is essential for impacts: interventions should reach everyone in a community with at least basic WASH services and incorporate future upgrading to safely managed services wherever possible.
- Collaboration between nutrition, health and WASH staff to design and deliver WASH programming through a multisectoral systems approach.
- Address blind spots in typical WASH programming including the role of animal waste and faecal contamination of food during irrigation and food preparation that are often overlooked in WASH programme design.
- A critical element of context–specific and risk–based programming will be the use of local health data to identify the specific diarrhoeal diseases and other WASH–related infections common in the area. Interventions can then be tailored to focus on the pathways most relevant to interrupt transmission of specific pathogens.