From awareness raising to sustainable behaviour change in school: the WASH in school road map

Development organisations working in the WASH sector tend to focus on their preferred methodologies for Hygiene and Sanitation (H&S) promotion, while the sustainability of an intervention depends much more on how the methodology is implemented and whether an enabling environment is in place. In 2014, Caritas Switzerland in Kenya started a learning and critical review process on how to improve its WASH in school interventions to finally make the step from raising students’ awareness on good H&S practices to sustainable behaviour change. As a result of this process, a number of lessons on how to foster the enabling environment were learned, based on which the WASH in school road map was developed. This article presents, for each phase of the WASH in school road map, the main lessons learned and how they have been implemented in Kenya.