The future is in our hands: Global Handwashing Day 2021

Last week, on the 15th October, it was Global Handwashing day. This day was designed to promote proper sanitation practices and to increase awareness of handwashing as a preventative measure of illness and disease, where it acts as a tool to remove barriers to education, economic opportunity and equity. 


In this post, I will outline how promoting handwashing as a mechanism to prevent disease and illness, is not quite as simple as biologist: Miryam Wahrman (William Patterson University of New Jersey), framed it in a 2020 Guardian article, where in reality, there a lot of different facets to the faucet... 
  
The "father of handwashing", Dr Semmelweis discovered the importance of handwashing over 150 years ago, and even though we have had this knowledge for over a century, handwashing still remains severely neglected as a public health investment. In West Africa, as shown in the figure below, the majority of people do not have basic handwashing facilities at home.




So... it isn't just right there?

Access to handwashing facilities are limited, and even where the infrastructure is in place, it is often unaffordable, unreliable and inaccessible, limiting the opportunity for effective handwashing. 

A large proportion of the population in West Africa have to fetch water from great distances, multiple times a day, from unprotected sources. However, two thirds of the relatively fortunate households who do have piped water systems, receive water intermittently and inconsistently. This case is particularly exaggerated in dry seasons where the availability decreases further, and as a consequence any available water is then stored and saved, where it is extremely difficult in these conditions to wash thoroughly, and practice effective hygiene measures. 

So.... it does cost something?

Even were there is reliable water infrastructure, the water has to be affordable for frequent handwashing to take place. Many cash-poor households have become acutely conscious of the cost of their water use, and as a consequence, handwashing occurs sparingly. 


Many hands make light work: the toolkit for hygiene advocacy 

Handwashing behaviour is notoriously hard to change. Partnerships with organisations as well as collaborations between sectors, can help to strengthen advocacy and ensure a meaningful change is implemented. As highlighted above, provision of health knowledge alone is insufficient, where it is vital to also invest in convenient and accessible hygiene infrastructures and products to ensure that handwashing facilities are "right there", available and accessible to all. 

The Global Handwashing Partnership (GHP) is a coalition that unifies expertise, experience, ideas, resources and reach of public and private sectors, where the key descriptors of successful hygiene advocacy are highlighted as: target and action-orientated, deliberate, evidence-based and collaborative. 

Advocates have an important role to play in pushing for this sustained investment in order to ensure availability and effective management of of water for all. According to the GHP toolkit, advocates should focus on developing strategies and budgets with all levels of government to allocate resources for monitoring outputs and results.
 

COVID 19 and Handwashing





Handwashing came to the forefront of discussions again during the pandemic, as it has the potential to interrupt several routes of COVID-19 transmission. At a time where something as "simple" as handwashing became the foundation for survival, it highlighted the importance to ensure that there are investments made into this provision in the long-term. 

So as many of us stood at our sinks washing our hands to the second round of the 'Happy Birthday song', did we stop to question that being able to access handwashing facilities in the home is luxury? 

Comments

  1. Richard taylorNovember 19, 2021 at 5:39 AM

    You present a simple, fundamental argument for hygiene well here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Sanitation StationNovember 22, 2021 at 3:35 AM

      Thank you! I really enjoyed writing this post, and looking beyond the performative actions of organisations, where in reality increasing the practice of handwashing is multifaceted and notoriously hard to change. I remain hopeful to see the actions that will come about as an effect of COVID 19, where globally the importance of handwashing was brought to light, where political elites and organisations can no longer divorce themselves form this pressing sanitation issue, as we all share the need to be able to access handwashing facilities.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Streams of shit: Sanergy to the rescue?

Image
As we have discussed in previous posts, one of the most effective ways to prevent dangerous sanitation practices, such as open defecation, is to maintain a well-functioning toilet that is safe and accessible for all. So how can we do this? Although current practices and facilities are less than adequate, the question is not whether to wipe them out and replace them with large-scale networked infrastructures, but instead, we need to tap into the everyday micro-politics of sanitation ,  to create a more dignified and safe sanitation experience.  A market-based approach: the "Fresh Life" toilet Take a look in this video below: Sanergy was designed in response to  rapid urbanisation and impending water scarcity . As a result of densely populated informal urban settlements, there is an abundance of human waste. Imagine if your waste wasn't flushed away after every visit to the toilet. Where would you put it? What if this was the case for yo...
Read more

Now is not the time to turn off the tap...

Image
This final instalment in my blog series will take a look to the future, where I will unpack the topic of water and sanitation in relation to the pressing issue of climate change. Several climate change studies predict that there will be fewer light precipitation events and more frequent heavy precipitation events, where this is particularly exaggerated in the tropics. According to  Cann et al. (2013) , one of the detrimental effects of climate change on water and sanitation is the rise in water-borne diseases due to more frequent and intense flood events.  The o utbreaks of disease were associated most frequently with contamination of drinking water supplies (57.3%) . Flooding can lead to contamination through the   widespread spillage of faecal matter into the environment , (as can be highlighted  in Figure 1) as well as the risk of damage to sewers and wastewater treatment plants. The contamination of water supplies poses  an enormous risk to developing countr...
Read more

Managing the subsurface: groundwater contamination in Kampala, Uganda

Image
Groundwater resources are the most important source of drinking water in Africa. In this weeks post, I will discuss Sub-Saharan Africa's poor waste management practices  and thus the contamination of groundwater in this region. Lets take a look... A Study of Kampala, Uganda  In 2007, a study was completed within the peri-urban site of Bwaise III, located in the northern part of Kampala city, with one of the highest population growth rates in the district . This research is effective in the ways that it synthesises the impacts of  land-use as well as the natural effects of its hydrogeological characteristics on the shallow groundwater storage. Figure 1: Map of the Kampala District showing the location of the Bwaise III Parish Bwaise III is a  typical poor, urban settlement that is largely unplanned , with many informal practices occurring to facilitate prosperity amongst a large and rapidly growing population. In areas where households are packed together i...
Read more