Paper short abstract:

Faith-based programmes were successful to improve general health maintenance, but have been unheeded to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) status. We designed a Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) to evaluate the effectiveness of a faith-based intervention.

Paper long abstract:

Faith-based programmes were successful to improve general health maintenance, but have been unheeded to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) status. We designed a Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) to evaluate the effectiveness of a faith-based intervention.

We designed a faith-based WASH Behaviour change intervention to improve the WASH situation in Islamic schools, their associated mosques and corresponding Muslim communities and Cristian Communities in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal.

We conducted a baseline survey in all clusters and delivered the intervention for six months and then conducted the endline survey among 192 respondents from Bangladesh, 236 from Indonesia and 248 from Nepal. A structured questionnaire was used for the data collection to determine current hygiene practices, facilities and knowledge. The data collector conducted face-to-face interviews, spot checks and hand washing demonstration and data was analyzed using STATA (version 13).

The results suggested improvement in knowledge, attitude and practices in the communities which indicates that using faith based interventions could be effective for improving hand washing practices and child faeces management. This is the first study focused on the Islamic faith-based approach to design and promote WASH interventions, which could be further tested as part of a broader intervention.