What are the key steps for establishing a hygiene promotion programme?
Updated - Monday 28 November 2005
What are the key steps for establishing a hygiene promotion programme?
1. Evaluate, along with the community concerned, which current hygiene conditions and practices are good or safe and which are risky.
- Involve representatives (men as well as women, and adolescent girls and boys) from the main socio-economic and ethnic/religious groups to get their perceptions
2. Plan, through consultations with your reference groups,which good hygiene practices to promote and which bad ones to eliminate and determine how this might be done.
- Prioritize and select, in consultation with the user group representatives, the key target practices and the primary, secondary and tertiary target audiences
- Through consultations, set the indicators which your programme will monitor to measure change and choose the methods and tools with which this will be done. Establish the baseline situation.
3. Implement a hygiene promotion programme that reflects the different needs and priorities of the different groups and is understandableand applicable for everyone.
4. Monitor and evaluate the programme with the different groups to see whether it is meeting objectives.
Adapted from: Howard, G, et al.., (2002). Healthy Villages: A guide for Communities and Community Health Workers, WHO, Geneva, Switzerland (Chapter 9).
