Guidelines on Hygiene in Schools

MENFP's guidelines for hygiene promotion in schools, issued in May 2012 in the aftermath of the cholera epidemic by the school health directorate. They are addressed to a deliberately wide readership, from departmental directors and programme managers to inspectors and teachers involved in school health, which is what makes them an operational instrument rather than a policy statement.

The case they rest on is a measured one: on the 2003 census, 77 percent of schools had no access to water and 60 percent had no sanitary installations, and the cholera epidemic then arrived into exactly that. The guidelines treat schools as places where millions of children are exposed to micro-pathogens, so the intervention is framed as protecting a known exposure rather than as raising standards in the abstract.

What distinguishes the document is that it takes behaviour change seriously as a problem in its own right, with a section on its complexity, an argument from environmental psychology about how messages must be framed, and the observation that the capacity and opportunity to keep practising a newly adopted behaviour matter as much as adopting it. It supplies an organizational model that involves pupils directly in school water, sanitation and hygiene interventions, an example assessment grid, and a monitoring section that asks which indicators to use and how often to verify them, including the percentage of children at a school who know the key prevention messages.