Since 2006, the Viet Nam Ministry of Health and the Viet Nam Women’s Union, with support from the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), have been carrying out an evidence-based, comprehensive behaviour change communications programme to promote handwashing with soap (HWWS) among women aged 15-49 and schoolchildren aged 6-10 throughout Viet Nam. The ultimate objective is to reduce the incidence of diarrhoeal diseases in children under the age of five.
The programme has reached more than 1.8 million people in the first phase, with a target of 30 million in phase II. Viet Nam is one of four countries (along with Tanzania, Senegal and Peru) involved in a large global Scaling Up HWWS Behaviour Change project by WSP. This tests whether innovative behaviour change approaches can generate widespread and sustained changes in handwashing with soap habits in target populations. To date, the programme has developed two communications campaigns, one aimed at caretakers of children under the age of five and the other targeting rural and semi-urban schoolchildren in Viet Nam.
Read more: Source Bulletin, May 2010
