ENPHO provided its technical support to successfully conduct a virtual workshop on Wash’Em, which was organized by UNICEF’s Regional Office for South Asia from 13th January to 3rd February 2022. The main objective of the training was to enhance the knowledge and skills of participants to design context-adapted, evidence-based handwashing behavior change programs.
Wash’Em is an evidence-based approach to hand hygiene program design in humanitarian crises. The training was implemented in a blended fashion, with self-facilitated learning on a specifically developed Learning Management System and 7 synchronous live sessions which were facilitated jointly by ENPHO and UNICEF.
The Wash’Em process includes three distinct steps to design handwashing behavior change programs;
Step 1- Learning about the target community.
Step 2- Entering the data into the program designer software and
Step 3- Generate recommendations
To enable participants experience and learn the toolkit, the training was conducted using a participatory approach; which included: providing opportunities to work in small groups on specific case studies and using Jamboard, Google docs, Google slides, Excel sheets, and other digital tools to use the different specific Wash’Em rapid assessment tools (Handwashing Demonstration, Personal Histories, Motives, Disease Perception, and Touchpoints) to collect and analyze the case study data. In the final session, participants received evidence-based recommendations for hand hygiene programming design and implementation. During the feedback session, participants revealed that the training was very relevant and effective. Some participants are planning on rolling out training themselves as the next steps, while others will start implementing the tool.
“The beauty of the Wash’Em software is it generates the recommendation itself while we feed data collected. It has provided specific activities to conduct in a particular community at humanitarian crisis.” Sujoy Mojumdar, WASH Specialist, UNICEF India
“We realized that Wash’Em process is very simple, easy to understand, and generated evidence-based recommendation. We will now be able to adopt it in our context.” Abigail Tevera, WASH specialist, UNICEF Solomon Islands0
Altogether, 30 participants from UNICEF’s regional and country offices from two regions (South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific regions) actively participated during the training.
