Summary report of the South Asia Hygiene practitioners’ workshop, 1 – 4 February 2010, Rajendrapur, Bangladesh

In February 2010, hygiene practitioners and researchers in Asia came to together to share lessons learned, discuss progress and challenges in promoting hygienic behaviours.  A substantial challenge—and the red thread through this exciting meeting—was how to move from knowledge to sustained practice, at scale. Reaching this goal requires intensive hygiene promotion, focus on enabling factors,  sufficient time, well-tested communication, flexibility.  Hygiene needs sustained attention. Considerable progress has been made in research, in improving knowledge about hygiene, and, partially, in improving hygienic practices. In 5 of the programmes represented at this workshop, hygiene promotion is being implemented at scale with more than a million people  Quite a bit of learning took place during the workshop. For instance, we agreed on the importance of hygiene promotion designed specifically for men. Many participants committed themselves to do something about menstrual hygiene promotion. Those involved in school programmes agreed that a major challenge is sustaining the effectiveness of school programmes. More attention is needed for the quality of communication and hygiene messages. For monitroing and resarch, we agreed that self-reporting –when people report on their own hygiene practices—provides very optimistic data. We need to test and use more valid and convenient tools to measure behaviour, particularly at scale.  Measuring behavioural change is preferred over the difficult health impact studies. To move forward, participants proposed a concrete follow-up to this successful workshop. Several participants will be collaborating on hygiene for men, school programmes and assessment methods. [authors abstract]