Sustaining and Scaling School Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Plus Community Impact (SWASH+): Nyanza Province, Kenya

Partners

CARE, Emory Center for Global Safe Water, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Coca-Cola

Problem

Over half of all Kenyans live below the poverty line.  Only 42 percent of the population has access to an adequate drinking water source, and just 30 percent have access to latrines. Nyanza province is the second poorest in Kenya. Much of the region is semi-arid and drought-prone. Women and children walk up to six kilometers each day to haul water, a three-hour trek. More than 90 percent of rural primary schools do not have safe water available. Nyanza province has a total of 4,117 primary schools, over 3,700 of which need some improvements in infrastructure to meet government-recommended standards.

Goal

In ten years, for 90 percent of primary schools in Nyanza Province and 50 percent of those in Kenya to have access to safe drinking water, effective hygiene promotion and improved sanitation. In that time, we also aim to create a successful model for scaling up water, sanitation and hygiene education programs in schools.

Description

Launched in September 2006 with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coca-Cola Company, SWASH+ Kenya is a five-year program focused on creating a scalable model for water, sanitation and hygiene education in schools. While the goal has always been the same, GWC and partner organizations have had to adjust the project design along the way. The original project design called for: 

• Two years spent increasing access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene in 250 schools, followed by a study to find what worked and didn't. From this study, we would create a model program that could be scaled in Kenya.
  
• A third year devoted to working with the Kenyan government to adopt this model and begin the transition from NGO-led implementation to more government-led implementation of school WASH.
•  Another two years of government-led implementation with support from SWASH+.

It became clear in July 2008, at the end of Year 2, that the Kenyan government was going to proceed with its own scaled-up school infrastructure program called the Kenya Education Sector Support Program (KESSP). The SWASH+ program needed to be nimble in order to influence the program and play a role in its implementation.GWC and other members of SWASH+ program management and implementation team attended joint discussions with the government, which led to the development of a model in which SWASH+ would test the KESSP model and improve upon it based on its own learning from direct implementation.

Despite delays in implementation, 200 schools in the Nyanza Province have already received safe water treatment and hygiene education, including the establishment of school management committees and school health clubs. The school sanitation package has been completed in 100 schools to date, with 575 people trained in basic latrine construction and component manufacturing. To date, 40 schools have received rainwater harvesting systems.

The community packages, which consists of a new water source for the community in addition to the schools program has been completed in 35 communities to date. However, the community investment component of the program has been decoupled from SWASH + because it was found that communities were not ready or able to repay the credit they received for new water systems.

As the shift in the project design suggests, GWC and its partners put great emphasis on monitoring and evaluating projects, as well as adapting based off results and the changing realities on the ground. The SWASH+ program’s unique combination of adaptive research and innovation has revealed many strengths and weaknesses in the manner in which non-government organizations, foundations and governments, approach school programming.

Early research from SWASH+ has generated some surprising results including:

• The link between improved school water, sanitation and hygiene and absenteeism is difficult to prove. This leads to questions about whether school-based interventions are sufficient or if WASH programs need to target communities at the same time.
  
• Hygiene messages in school do not necessarily have an appreciable impact on parent’s hygiene habits, i.e. message transfer from students to parents, if it occurs, does not necessarily lead to behavior change.
  
• Making hand washing facilities available does not automatically mean that children will have fewer bacteria on their hands when tested. This could ironically be because latrine installation could cause children to go to the bathroom more when at school and therefore have dirtier hands in the short run.

By assessing the effectiveness of the SWASH+ with rigorous research and sharing the results widely, we hope that SWASH+ and other GWC supported programs will be able to impact the manner in which schools programs are designed in every country in which they are active, and also have a positive impact on the programming of others in the sector.

Read the November 2009 Progress Report.

Read the Decemeber 2008 Progress Report