In humanitarian emergency settings there is need for low cost and rapidly deployable interventions to protect vulnerable children, in- and out-of-school, from diarrhoeal diseases. Handwashing with soap can greatly reduce diarrhoea but interventions specifically targeting children’s handwashing behaviour in humanitarian settings have not been tested. Traditional children’s handwashing promotion interventions have been school-focused, resource-intensive and reliant on health-based messaging. However, recent research from non-humanitarian settings and targeting adults suggests that behaviour change interventions targeting specific motives may be more effective. This paper demonstrates that distributing soaps with toys embedded inside, in a rapidly deployable intervention, can improve child handwashing behaviour in a humanitarian emergency context.
Who is it for? Practitioners/specialists designing or implementing handwashing programmes
Why is it important? It presents a novel evidence-based intervention that has been proven successful in increasing rates of handwashing amongst children in a humanitarian setting. It fills a gap in the literature on handwashing initiatives that target children though households (rather than schools), and on handwashing in humanitarian contexts. Although an academic paper, the idea it presents is simple (and simply written about) making the paper more accessible to non-academic or specialist readers than some other academic papers.
