Can Hygiene be Cool and Fun? Insights from School Children in Senegal

This 12-page document shares information from a research project conducted by the Hygiene Centre of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in collaboration with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Senegal, the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) Africa, and The National Office of Sanitation in Senegal. The research, conducted in primary schools in Dakar, Senegal, looked at the motivating factors for children to adopt hygienic hand-washing and toilet practices. The research aimed to inform the design of sanitation and hygiene programmes in schools. The research suggests that relatively simple low-cost interventions can have far-reaching effects in improving children’s hygiene practices, if communicators take into account motivational factors and children’s sensitivities in relation to toilet practice and personal hygiene.

To develop communication programmes for primary school children, the first step was to gain a better general understanding of this age group, their habits, their motivations, and their world. According to the researchers, innovative tools were used to gather insights from children themselves. Behaviour trials were carried out in two public schools for a period of one week each. During the trials, a hand-washing stand was placed in front of each classroom, bonuses were given to cleaning staff to ensure clean and nice-smelling toilets, and an intensive awareness campaign was conducted. At the end of the week, a debriefing was held where children could express their opinions about what they had liked and not liked in the trial. The researchers also had children keep diaries and express their interests and consumer habits, in order to better understand children’s habits, and how to communicate with them.

Researchers found that in many cases children are fully aware of good sanitation and hygiene and there are a wide range of reasons why pupils avoid school toilets and hand washing. The debriefing following the behaviour trials found that the following factors motivated children to wash their hands: conformity, sensory benefits, fun, disease avoidance, and getting better marks (because their books were cleaner).

The findings of the formative research have implications for the design of school hygiene programmes both in Senegal and elsewhere. The following are some of the recommendations for communicators:

• Messages should be designed for each set of actors. School hygiene depends on the motivations of different sets of actors, the authorities, the heads of school, the employees, the staff, and the children. Changing a school’s hygiene culture means understanding these issues and finding solutions to fit each case.
• Position hygiene as a 'cool' attribute. Hand-washing needs to be positioned not as the 'geeky' behaviour that adults want from kids, but rather as a practice that can help children to be what they passionately aspire to be. Kids follow music and sports icons to find clues on how to be 'in' and, hence, such celebrities could help make hand-washing cool.
• Make hand-washing fun and part of a socialising activity. Children hate wasting socialising time on hand-washing. Activities that can make hand-washing playful and social are more likely to work in schools.
• Use popular media, especially television. Mass media increasingly reaches school children around the world, providing important clues as to what is desirable or 'cool' behaviour.
• Reinforce the management capacities of the head teachers. Hygiene interventions in schools too often focus solely on training teachers to pass on hygiene messages to children. However, these findings show that children know the messages but can’t put them into practice due to poor management of the facilities, as well as the lack of hygiene materials.
• Find classroom-by-classroom solutions. To a child, their school class is the most important social unit after their family.
• Building the feeling that 'our school is the best' or 'our classroom is the best' worked to stimulate change. Inter-school and inter-classroom competition works and can help return schools’ lost status as places where children are educated to be contributing citizens.

As a follow-up the following activities are planned:

• Beautiful toilet competition - a national inter-school competition for the cleanest and best-decorated toilets.
• Hand washing fun fairs.
• Song competition - students can submit original rap songs to their school, and the winning song will be performed in collaboration with famous Senegalese Hip Hop artists. The song will be released and played on radio and TV.
• Cartoon super hero - Production and transmission of an attractive, high quality TV cartoon super hero series which promotes hand-washing and has all the 'cool' attributes that children seek (rap, clothing, and a gadget for dispensing soap).
• Letter writing campaign - Pupils could write letters to senior officials asking for better toilets and hygiene facilities.
• Scrub clubs - will be responsible for assigning toilets to classes and for the organisation of toilet cleaning and interior decoration.