Impact

No one asks why clean toilets with doors that close properly are needed, or why students must have water in their school. But many want to know the extent of the payoff when investments are made in school WASH.  Parents, teachers, and governments ask questions such as, If water and sanitation are no longer problems at school, will children miss fewer school and be sick less? Will their test scores go up? Because there are limited data available on the nature of these links, impact measurement becomes all the more important within school WASH.

In SWASH+ Kenya, the analysis of a final evaluation focusing on impact is underway. An earlier evaluation based on interviews with pupils, conducted after two years of implementation “suggests that all intervention groups are making improvements in the regular availability of appropriate water, sanitation and hygiene facilities and that children’s knowledge, attitudes and behaviors are improving as well.” But the relationship between these changes and absenteeism and health is still murky.  According to the evaluation, “there is little evidence that [these changes] have resulted in attributable improvements in health or attendance so far.” Additional records and further research may still provide evidence of these impacts, or in the event of unproven links, would lead researchers and implementers to find answers to why this is the case and understand how school WASH interacts with other hygiene behavioral considerations. 

SWASH+ Central America monitoring efforts are focused on access and sustainability, with the underlying belief that school WASH is a necessary component of upholding a child’s right to an education. A baseline study was conducted by the World Water Corps® (a program of Water For People) to be able to measure achievements in these key areas. The World Water Corps® is a program that matches volunteers with a variety of unique skills and experiences with the specific needs and requirements of overseas programs for sustainable, safe drinking water resources, improved sanitation facilities, and hygiene education programs.

The SWASH+ experience in Kenya and Central America confirm the obvious issues of preference and convenience: that children avoid using dirty, smelly latrines and having clean water available for drinking and hand washing significantly improves their quality of life. However, it is still not clear the extent to which these activities taken by themselves impact attendance at school, and health, at least in these two contexts.