Introducing hygiene elements into sanitation monitoring

With the 2015 Millennium Development Goal deadline approaching, discussion has turned to how to improve monitoring strategies post-2015. Key aims are to find ways to include hygiene in sanitation monitoring, evaluate the sustainability of improvements and encourage the formulation of pro-poor policy. However, at present, no robust indicator of hygiene (particularly hand-washing) has been found, and it is unclear whether current methods encourage sustainable, pro-poor interventions. This study compared various potential indicators using a dataset collected through household surveys in Kenya, with a view to testing the current approach’s predictive ability in hygiene and recommend indicators which could be used to monitor hygiene directly. The results suggested that the current approach does not reliably predict a good standard of hygiene, but that the presence of a hand-washing facility with soap could be used as a practical, global hand-washing indicator.