Sustaining WASH Behaviour Change Results with Participatory Monitoring Tools: Abstract

"How do you ensure that the communities you’ve worked with will maintain their new adopted healthy behaviour? How do you manage to keep track of toilets and hand washing facilities used by 1.4 million people living in over 1,000 villages in five remote islands?"

The focus of this Communications Support for Health (CSH) presentation for the International SBCC Summit 2016, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, February 8-10, describes community ownership of monitoring in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programmes.

From the abstract:
"How do you ensure that the communities you’ve worked with will maintain their new adopted healthy behaviour? How do you manage to keep track of toilets and hand washing facilities used by 1.4 million people living in over 1,000 villages in five remote islands? And how do you ensure that all those facilities are used and continue to function well forever? Community ownership of monitoring and subsequent follow-up is seen as the key success factor to overcome the above challenges. This can be done with enthusiastic local leadership and motivated villagers. It also requires developing the necessary capacities of these leaders and villagers so that they are able to monitor and maintain progress in their own communities. In our water and sanitation programme in Indonesia we employ a community-owned results-based monitoring system which put communities and their leaders in the driving seat. The monitoring system provides the community leaders with all the information they need to successfully implement the programme activities and steer their community towards changing their unhealthy behaviour, as well as maintain it even after the programme finished. Additionally the information generated by the monitoring system allows the local government authorities to take informed decisions on where to focus their support.

Key hghlights:
It is essential that monitoring is done in a participatory way. The volunteers visit a house and talk to the people living there. Through a guided self-assessment they are asked to score a number of specific indicators. Through this process the members of the household realise their own situation and may want to improve. Monitoring is therefore also an opportunity for motivating and encouraging people to make improvements and sustain them. In order to get the correct monitoring data, pictograms have been developed which help to explain the various situations the volunteers can encounter. Also in case of illiteracy or part illiteracy of interviewees these pictograms can be very helpful in explaining and scoring a particular situation."