While at the 6th World Water Forum, Marseille, in March this year, I attended an interesting side-event on behaviour change in sanitation and hygiene, convened by the Global Community of Practice on Sanitation and Hygiene and WSSCC. The event was moderated by Pippa Scott of WSSCC. The session was a free debate on what works and doesn’t work in changing behaviors for sanitation and hygiene. The session was attended by 31 participants from 14 countries. The following was the interesting output of the frank discussions:

What works in changing behaviors?

• Targeted interventions (what incentives and messages work in a given context?)and discover the key points of change, what is the crucial “tipping point” for target groups (i.e. privacy for girls in Cambodia). Targeting children to take the messages to
elders.
• Repetition so that practice comes behaviour
• Incentives, positive reinforcements, aspiration (self worth, dignity, motivation)
• Self-realization and discovery, strong emotions, personal competition, peer
pressure.
• Product placement and branding (marketing for social change)
• Improving user experiences (make it enjoyable, uplifting, cool!)
• Try everything that works, respond to the situation with flexibility. Use not only one
approach, but try different approaches and broaden out.

What doesn’t work in changing behaviors?

• Health messages, they are too abstract
• Don’t ask anyone to change behavior that you want, generate self-realization
• Creating user experiences in poor conditions is difficult
• Tragedy of promise EXAMPLE: from Uganda, shared handwashing basin by public
latrines is not refilled because people don’t want to use clean water to fill a basin
for collective use for handwashing, water is perceived as too
precious for that.

Anyone interested in adding more points; or, may like to share some personal experience on changing behaviors.

F H Mughal

Hi,
This is a nicely framed and comprehensive write up on behavior change. The output is really interesting and true to the grass-root real sense!
Thanks for sharing,
-Ananya

Dear Ms. Ananya,

Thank you for your nice comments. This is the first response I got after nearly 8 months. Thanks anyway!

For some reasons, not known to me, hygiene and behavior change aspects receive relatively low priority on this forum. My nearly 40 years' of experience in WASH tells me that the benefits of safe water and appropriate sanitation cannot be fully achieved, in absence of the hygiene aspect. Hygiene goes hand in hand with water and sanitation. To incorporate hygiene, behavior change is required.

This is an important forum and, hygiene and behavior change should receive high priority.

Perhaps, Dr. Elisabeth, Christian, and Trevor may look into this and, come up with some suggestions. The least Dr. Elisabeth, et al. can do is to collect hygiene and behavior change publications, worldwide and, disseminate them through this forum.

Regards,

F H Mughal

Hi Mr. Mughal,

I work in Wash United, India. As per your comment, yes, both are related topics and we have been organizing regular Skype calls in our office with Behavior Change experts all over the world to dive deeper into the aspect. We, in Wash United, believe in using positive triggers. Thus, instead of triggers such as 'shame' and 'disgust', we believe in using games and cultural media for Behavior Change.

The issue of Hygiene, Sanitation and the change of Behavior is like fighting out a deep-rooted king-sized demon. Publications on Behavior Change would surely be a great help in this fight towards a clean world.

Thank you for bringing up the topic.

-Ananya