Viet Nam: research-based campaign messaging is critical for sustaining handwashing behaviour change

Using data from formative research to focus messaging on mothers’ aspirations for their children and fine-tuning activities based on feedback from the field and household survey data have been key to developing and implementing a handwashing with soap behavior change program in Vietnam.

A new Learning Note, Vietnam: A Handwashing Behavior Change Journey for the Caretakers’ Program published by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), describes the steps that were taken to design, implement, and monitor the program to aid program managers in developing other handwashing and hygiene promotion efforts.

Working closely with the Woman’s Union, the program’s activities in Vietnam reached 540 communes in 10 provinces. The project also trained more than 15,000 community motivators who reached more than 1.76 million women through interpersonal communications activities. As the Learning Note reports, these activities evolved over time based on information from the monitoring systems.

“As the target audiences move beyond knowledge to intention to handwash with soap, behavior change messages must also be modified,” the report found, adding that as the project progressed, opportunities arose to “fine-tune the interpersonal communications activities based on feedback from the field and from the household monitoring data.”

Asia: leadership for sanitation needed at both central and local level

The responsibility for sanitation in Asia is fragmented over different agencies, and in most cases the priority given to sanitation is low. Therefore more leadership and political will is needed to make sure that organisational structures function, that plans with good intentions become a reality on the ground and that resources go to the right places. While leadership for sanitation is needed at all levels, it’s most urgent at sub national level, in districts and provinces, because it’s there where the actions take place.

This is the outcome of an email discussion [1] of the WASH Asia Dgroup platform held from 9 August to 9 September 2011. The discussion was moderated by the SNV Asia knowledge network and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, and involved 120 WASH practitioners from 5 different countries in Asia.

Viet Nam: Integrating sanitation marketing into a national program

Nguyen, H.H. (2011). Integrating sanitation marketing into a national program : a case study in Vietnam. Brisbane, QLD, Australia, International Water Centre.
Read the full report

Supply-driven approaches to rural sanitation in Viet Nam, with associated toilet subsidies, have had little success over the last decade. Since 2003, International Development Enterprises (IDE) Vietnam has achieved better results in several pilots with an alternative approach involving rural sanitation marketing. As a result, the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) has supported IDE in collaboration with the Health Environment Agency of the Ministry of Health (MOH) (HEMA) to implement a rural sanitation marketing pilot project within the National Target Program II (NTP II) program in Quang Tri province since 2010. This report  provides an analysis of the potential as well as the constraints for integrating sanitation marketing into NTP II.

Asia: accelerated and sustainable progress in sanitation and hygiene is within our reach, hygiene experts say

Accelerated and sustainable progress in sanitation and hygiene is within reach in Asia, as long as we aim at district-wide coverage and build a broad alliance under leadership of local governments. This is the main conclusion of sanitation and hygiene experts from five countries (Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia) participating in a workshop for governance on water, sanitation and hygiene organized by the Nepal government together with SNV Netherlands Development Organisation and the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre from 13 to 17 September 2011.

Regional sharing and learning from experiences is an important aspect of the Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All programme being implemented in 17 districts across Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, implemented by local government partners and assisted by SNV and IRC since 2008. Last year, this programme was intensified with co-funding from the AusAID Civil Society WASH Fund and recently with support from DFID in Vietnam. The aim is to contribute to giving two million rural people access to improved hygiene and sanitation facilities by the end of 2015.

Viet Nam: Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola support school water and sanitation projects

Multinationals Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola are separately supporting small-scale water and sanitation projects for schools.

UNICEF and Procter & Gamble collaboration for WASH in primary schools

UNICEF and global consumer product provider Procter & Gamble (P&G) have joined forces to provide water and sanitation facilities in primary schools in Viet Nam and educate children, parents and teachers about hygienic practices. Schools in areas most in need are being selected in Dien Bien, Ninh Thuan, An Giang and Dong Thap provinces. The joint UNICEF-P&G project will run till the end of 2011 and the total investment from P&G is 200,000 US$.

Through its “For a Bright Future” programme, P&G has helped build more than 30 sanitation facilities for schools, benefiting more than 12,000 children.

A recent survey showed that 20 per cent of schools in Viet Nam have no water source. The proportion is lowest among secondary schools (four per cent) and highest among pre-schools (34 per cent). In addition, while 73 per cent of schools have latrines, only 12 per cent of rural schools have hygienic latrines meeting Ministry of Health standards.

Improving sanitation facilities and practises in primary schools is an integral part of UNICEF’s Provincial Child-Friendly Program. P&G’s “For the Brighter Future” program in Viet Nam is part of P&G’s “Live, Learn and Thrive” global corporate cause that focuses on improving lives of children till the age of 13 years.

Source: UNICEF, 04 Oct 2010

Coca Cola inaugurates water supply in secondary school

Coca Cola inaugurated a safe water construction at the Van Binh secondary school, together with other safe water constructions in Thuong Tin district, Hanoi, providing nearly 6,000 pupils and students and 183 families access to safe water.

The constructions include wells, water treatment facilities, water tanks and wash basins, with an investment of over USD 28,500.

They are the final constructions of the project “Safe water for the community” in 2010 by Coca Cola and the Research Center for Family Health and Community Development (CEFACOM).

The project began in 2004. This year, many constructions have successfully been carried out in residential areas and schools in Thu Duc district in Ho Chi Minh City, Lien Chieu district in Danang City and Thuong Tin district in Hanoi.

The project has brought safe water and benefits to over 15,500 students and people

Source: Hanoi Times, 09 Sep 2010

Viet Nam: hygiene promotion should build on community action

The path down to a stream where children defecate. Viet Nam, Lao Ca province. Photo: Danida

More affordable sanitation technologies and participatory community interventions will make future hygiene promotion more effective, say two PhD-fellows Xuan Le Thi Thanh and Thilde Rheinländer. They have spent 16 months in ethnic minority communities in the Northern Province Lao Cai to do research on hygiene and sanitation promotion in the Danida-funded research project SANIVAT (Water Supply Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion in Vietnam). SANIVAT supports research and capacity building on the impacts of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions and investigates how people perceive hygiene, health risks and hygiene promotion.

Viet Nam: VND54 trillion for rural water supply programme

More than VND54 trillion [US$ 2.77 billion] will be allocated for the national target programme o­n rural water supply and environmental sanitation from 2011 to 2015 to improve locals’ living conditions, according to the Standing Office of the National Target Programme for Rural Water Supply and Sanitation.

Of the total, VND21.8 trillion [US$ 1.12 billion] will be earmarked for water supply and VND25.6 trillion [US$ 1.32 billion] for hygiene in households and schools.

The programme aims to improve water supply services, raise people’s awareness and change the community’s behaviour regarding environmental protection. Priority will be given to remote, island, drought-stricken and polluted areas to benefit poor and ethnic minority people.

Vietnam has set a goal of supplying running water to 83 percent of the rural population by the end of 2010. A programme official says the goal would be [surpassed] this year, with 85 percent of the people accessing safe water. However, o­nly 63 percent of rural households would have [hygienic] latrines, 7 percent less than the goal.

Related web site: Viet Nam – Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Partnership (RWSSP)

Source: Hanoi Times, 12 Jul 2010 ; Nhan Dan 12 Jul 2010

Viet Nam: designing evidence-based communications programmes for handwashing with soap

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

Viet Nam: sustainability of rural sanitation marketing

Access to sanitary toilets continues to rise in coastal communities in Viet Nam years after a successful pilot project ended.

ADCOM Vietnam, WSP [Water and Sanitation Program] and IRC [International Water and Sanitation Centre] wrote a case study [1] on the sustainability of the rural sanitation marketing (RSM) pilot project in Vietnam. This pilot project was very successful. Between January 2003 and June 2006, over a period of 34 months, households in the 30 pilot communes constructed or upgraded 15,149 toilets, an average of 3,787 toilets per year. This was four times more than during the conventional programme. Of the owners, an average of 16% was below the poverty line, against an average of 19% in the target population. Almost three years after the end of the pilot project, the case study team went back to eight communes to look at the sustainability of the approach and the results. In all study communes, all but one of the promoters had continued the promotion of sanitary toilets and the end of open defecation without incentives, be it at a lower intensity. The local private sector had meanwhile developed further. They now offered a larger range of products with varying prices and also gave various types of credit to customer.

Sanitation Leaflet. Photo: IDE/WSP (fig. 13 in WSP publication)

A number of lessons can be drawn from the case study both for Viet Nam and other countries.

“Long-term sustainability of the sanitation marketing approach in Vietnam—and elsewhere—seems to depend on several factors,” observes report co-author Jacqueline Devine, senior social marketing specialist at WSP. “These factors include providing ongoing budgeting for market research, production of promotional materials, and institutionalized promoter and provider training; adding Community-Led Total Sanitation to eradicate open defecation; and developing a more poor-specific marketing strategy.”

Read the summary of the findings of the RSM study

See also a diagram and two presentations on the RSM pilot project

[1] Sijbesma, C., Truong, T.X. and Devine, J. (2010). Case study on sustainability of rural sanitation marketing in Vietnam. (Global Scaling Up Sanitation Project. Technical paper). Washington, DC, USA, Water and Sanitation Program. xi, 78 p. : 8 boxes, 31 fig., 16 tab. 37 ref. Download full report [PDF, 4.72 MB]

A presentation discussing the case study’s findings and recommendations will be streamed LIVE via the Web on Thursday, May 6, 8 – 10 am (U.S. Eastern Standard Time). The streamed Webcast will be available to the public through the following URL (activated during event only): mms://wbmswebcast1.worldbank.org/live.

Source: IRC – Rural Sanitation Marketing in Vietnam, 03 May 2010 ; WSP, 30 Apr 2010

ADB to evaluate water sector performance in 2009

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) plans to conduct a Special Evaluation Study (SES) on the performance of its water sector policy and operations in 2009/2010.

The SES wll focus on evaluating the relevance, compliance, effectiveness, and impact of the ADB’s water policy.

It will:

1. examine specific features of the ADB water policy, including its intent, directives, safeguards, and development approaches;
2. assess the adequacy, coverage, and relevance of the water policy to ADB operations, taking into account current and emerging regional and global issues on water use, climate change, and related issues;
3. assess the policy’s comprehensiveness, consistency, and robustness from a technical perspective (reflective of current technical and scientific understanding);
4. examine the extent to which the water policy has been taken into consideration in project design and implementation;
5. assess the effectiveness and impact of the water policy by examining the performance of ADB water sector assistance before and after the implementation of the policy and by identifying trends that can be attributed to the policy; and
6. identify lessons learned and issues to be considered in guiding ADB water sector assistance in the future.

The SES will be undertaken through (i) a desk review, (ii) a before-and-after comparison of water policy implementation, (iii) an in-depth study of successful projects, (iv) focus-country studies, (v) thematic studies, and (vi) internal and external outreach activities.

The desk review will cover all ADB water sector projects approved since 2001, when the new sector policy was introduced, as well as projects nearing approval. ADB water sector projects approved since 1995 will be included in the before-and-after comparison.

About 8–10 successful projects will be selected for the in-depth studies to identify lessons for broader application.

Some tentative topics for thematic studies include (i) new types of investment in the water sector arising from climate change, (ii) corporate governance and capacity building for water utilities, (iii) improving public sector performance, and (iv) the relationship between ADB internal organization and the ADB Water Policy

Besides the water sector SES, there are two ongoing sector sector assistance program evaluations (SAPE), which started in 2008:

• SAPE – Urban Services and Water Supply and Sanitation – Bangladesh
• SAPE – Urban Water Supply and Sanitation – Viet Nam

Finally, the ADB will also evaluate the Punjab Rural Community Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Pakistan.

Source: ADB, Selected Evaluation Studies for 2009-Phase 1, June 2009