Providing access to proper handwashing facilities, as well as sufficient water for washing hands is the easy part. Driving people to consistently wash their hands is the greatest challenge.
For example, when the Rotary-USAID partnership provided two new toilet blocks with flushing toilets, a borehole, and hand washing stations at Kade Presbyterian School, the question remained: would the school’s students use the facilities properly – and wash their hands afterwards?
“Making healthy behavior a habit is a process,” says Patience Ado-Asquoah, a teacher at Kade Presbyterian School and member of the school’s health club. She is also the coordinator of Kade Presby’s School Health Education Program, the Ghanaian government’s initiative to promote healthy living. “Hygiene education is only one part of it.” Teachers use a variety of methods to encourage students to promote healthy habits, including drama sketches, stories and songs and posters around the school to reinforce the message continuously.
Making healthy behavior a habit is a process. Hygiene education is only one part of it. We also use drama sketches and textbooks about the benefits of hygiene. We encourage them to sing songs when they wash their hands. We have posters on the wall around the school to always remind them. We watch them and discipline them if they don’t follow the rules. It takes time and has to be done repeatedly, every day
Under the partnership, Rotary leverages the technical expertise of USAID and local government agencies to train and support school health promoters such as Ado-Asquoah. However, there is often not much governmental support in Ghana for the work of community-based hygiene promoters. Worse, local government agencies themselves often lack sufficient resources for monitoring and retraining of hygiene promoters.
This is where Rotary members add value to the partnership on the ground. By conducting regular inspection visits at schools and driving community advocacy efforts, Rotary members reinforce the school trainings and help the school hygiene promoters identify and address gaps.
But progress in driving people to adopt healthy behavior takes time.
A 2019 independent study of earlier Rotary-USAID projects in Ghana found that while most heads of households understood the importance of hand washing and encouraged it in their families, children still had poor hand-washing practices. Also, a majority of residents washed their hands with soap in only 17 percent of communities.
Editing by RI’s Diana Schoberg with additional reporting from RI’s Mohamed Keita. Photography by Andrew Esiebo
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