Dear Elisabeth, many thanks! I will check it out.

A quick note to say that the Cochrane review on WASH and undernutrition should be finally published tomorrow.
Our briefing note on the subject, co-published with SHARE and LSHTM, can be found here: www.wateraid.org/uk/~/media/Publications...rition-and-WASH.ashx

The review will be available, as of late tonight, on this link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=...651858.CD009382.pub2

Best regards, Yael

Dear Yael,
Great to have you on the forum! WaterAid has been a SuSanA partner for several years, so it is great to hear from a WaterAid staff member here on the forum.

Regarding your question on notification of new posts, you will find the answer here in the help section:
forum.susana.org/forum/categories/135-qu...e-to-all-forum-posts

Should any other questions pop up, please refer to the help section or write your question there if it hasn't been answered yet:
www.forum.susana.org/forum/categories/132-forum-help-section

Regards,
Elisabeth

Hi everyone,
Great comments - I didn't realise there was so much discussion going on (on that matter, does anyone know how I can set my profile to receive notifications every time a reply is added? I am indeed a 'novice user'...)

Thanks to those who have worked on the WG factsheet - I will do my best to add my comments on this. I also wanted to let you know that the Cochrane review on WASH and undernutrition done by LSHTM (Alan Dangour and Louise Watson) is about to be finally published this month, and I look forward to sharing it with you. WaterAid, LSHTM and SHARE will be issuing a press release and we will use this also to update our existing briefing note.

All the best, Yael

Dear FRANCKCONCERN;

#It is my pleasure to see motivated WaSH guy from Concern WW. I did a recerch entitled 'Impact of WaSH on CMAM' while I was WaSH senior officer in Concern Worldwide-ethiopian country office.

have a look at the research and lets discuss on the overall program improvement of CWW!!

thanks

Franck

Many thanks for this useful post.
May I copy it to the members of a WASH and Nutrition Community of Practice that we are developing?
The link is: usaidlearninglab.org/working-group/commu...tion-and-feed-future


Best regards,
Dan Campbell

Dear All,

Concern Worldwide advocacy department is involved in the SUN Movement but my own modest task as a WASH technical adviser is to identify practical ways for our WASH and nutrition programme teams to work towards more integration, the development of cross-sectorial approaches.
So far, we are investigating the following possible links between WASH/Nutrition/Health programmes:
1. Through the setting up of 1 single team for all the behaviour change activities implemented by Concern in a country across all sectors (nutrition, health, WASH).
We are promoting the same DBC approach (Design for Behaviour Change) within the maternal and newborn child health, nutrition and WASH programmes which should help the teams to increase their links.e.g. : Barrier analysis on hand washing with soap for both WASH and health/nutrition team.
2. Through FIM : by promoting the use of grey water for agricultural activities so that the increased food productivity leads to better food availability, which should then improve the food intake and with this the nutrition status. Such a programme is called nutrition sensitive and addresses food insecurity which is one of the underlying causes of malnutrition (in contrast to nutrition specific interventions which tackle the immediate causes such as poor health, inappropriate feeding and caring practices and poor water and sanitation).
3. Through linking nutrition and WASH objectives, M&E, studies: WASH interventions have been undervalued because we are measuring their impact on diarrhoea and not on growth.
A major argument for linking more nutrition and WASH comes from a recent study and its preliminary findings show that growth might be a more sensitive indicator of sanitation and water benefits than diarrhea : besides the short-term impact on nutrition (acute malnutrition/ wasting) through diarrhoea diseases, poor sanitation and bad quality water affect the guts permeability and consequently, the absorption of nutrients and thus has a long-term impact on the nutritional status (chronic malnutrition/ stunting).
www.sdc.admin.ch/en/Home/Projects/Projec...l?projectdbID=218331
If any of you is working in a programme with a nutrition programme who have data on stunting/growth and if you plan to implement a new WASH intervention in the same area, it could be worthy to try to measure the impact of this WASH intervention through the stunting/growth data.
Another option would be to look within the DHS – Demographic Health Surveys - data and try to see if in the region where we are implementing the WASH, there is some correlation between growth related indicators and WASH. E.g stunting rate is lower in regions with strong WASH interventions than in other similar context (of course for an impact to be seen, it would mean that the intervention has been going on for 3-5 years).
Last not least, the new DDG Digital Data Gathering system allows new possibilities in terms of linkage/correlation. By crossing data from WASH and nutrition programmes you may find out interesting stuff . E.g distance to fetch water and diarrhea reported in the nutrition survey.
4. Each time a health/nutrition/child survival / MCH programme is working with a health facility (or in school), the WASH team should inspect and prioritise the work on the buildings to ensure that they have access to good sanitation, quality water and hygiene (soap station). – or to advocate for the government health team (or school headmaster) to use their own budget to do so. You should also highlight to the health staff the importance to practice good hygiene behaviours (e.g. frequent hand washing with soap between patient consultations, cleaned up consultation rooms, clean latrines) not only to avoid infections but also to act as a role model in the community.

Please feel free to comment these ideas – all critics are welcome – or to add other options according to your own experience.
Amicalement
Franck Flachenberg

Rhock, please sign in to the Learning Lab and then request membership in the WASH/Nutrition group at: usaidlearninglab.org/working-group/commu...tion-and-feed-future

Let me know if you have any problems, this is not a user friendly platform unfortunately.

Dan, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dear Rob;

I am keen to develop atleat two page research based fact sheet to initiate discussion.

thanks

Dan, I've signed up to the USAID learning lab and am listed as a member, but I'm told access is denied when I try to go to any of the WASH and Nutrition documents. Can you help or elaborate?

On the whole a great initiative. I would certainly recommend the work of Dean Spears on the links between poor sanitation and nutrition.

Hello

Many thanks for starting this group. The WASHPlus project recently started a Community of Practice on this topic and I look forward to participating in the SuSanA Working Group. We have set up a Resource Library on WASH and Nutrition. Anyone can access the library but an account must first be set up on the USAID Learning Lab, usaidlearninglab.org.

Best regards,
Dan Campbell

Robert, Yael,

Thanks for your initiatives.

I believes it would be interesting to start working on the outline of the Fact sheet. I am happy to provide a very first draft "for Discussion".

Further inputs from technical Nutritionist will be needed and welcome to counter the technical view of the Wash specialist. I am hoping to get something to you by next week.

Yael - Thanks for the document, I am glad to see that other organisations are looking into the relation between Wash and Nutrition.

Interesting time!

Karl

Hi Robert,
Thank you for kickstarting this discussion. The activities seem sensible and quite straight-forward, and I would be happy to contribute to this. There is already a WaterAid/SHARE briefing note on WASH and nutrition, which we aim to update as more research information is made public, and may be of use as a starting point: www.wateraid.org/~/media/Publications/Un...rition-and-WASH.ashx

A question to you and to others - beyond thinking about this in terms of research and communications, are there other key policy processes that we could try to get involved in to ensure that WASH is seen as part of the nutrition agenda? For example, we might want to consider getting involved in the Scale Up Nutrition (SUN) movement discussions.

Thanks again and looking forward to working together.

Yael