The Handwashing Handbook

This handbook, produced by The Global Public Private Partnership for Handwashing, outlines an approach to the promotion of handwashing with soap. It is designed for staff in government and development organisations and decision-makers in ministries and funding agencies, either designing policies and programmes to improve public health, or carrying out handwashing programmes. It is based on and includes research on the prevention of diarrhoeal diseases in children.

From the introduction:

"This handbook outlines how handwashing behavior can be changed on a large or national scale by providing lessons from industrial marketing approaches as well as from current public health thinking. Its core feature is a focus on the potential handwasher as a consumer, who has many choices to make. With the handwasher as the focal point, this handbook explains how to:

• Research consumer needs to delve into handwashing habits, barriers and drivers of behavior change, and the best ways to communicate to the target audience;
• Design appropriate and appealing messages; and
• Implement a promotion program that makes use of all suitable channels, including outreach workers, citizen networks, special events, soap distributors, schools, and mass media."

Section 1 of this handbook describes the foundations for a national handwashing programme. It gives advocacy tools for conducting a Rapid Situation Analysis and making the case to government, industry, and financiers for comprehensive programme development.

Section 2 discusses how to understand consumers so that the handwashing campaign can be designed around their reality. It gives information on designing, implementing, managing, and supervising consumer research to be used in constructing a handwashing campaign. The document uses case studies to discuss hygiene habits as products of the physical environment, cultural beliefs on disease prevention, and consumer preferences, among others.

Section 3 explains how new insights can become a campaign that is effective in changing handwashing behaviour. It gives advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to communication and lessons learned in the implementation of these in various cultural settings, including using schools as a locus for early behaviour change.

Section 4 outlines the organisation of a handwashing programme, providing information that spans the preparatory stages; it is designed to be read in parallel with previous sections. It provides models of public-private partnerships for marketing soap and handwashing behaviours, as well as examples of manufactures' marketing programmes.

The annex provides a section on tools and terms of reference. In addition to defining terms, this section gives survey techniques and considerations for obtaining accurate information on behaviour and opinions from women and children, as well as sample questionnaires, checklists for observations, and information on training of data collectors.