Journal article

Background: There is growing attention to addressing the menstrual hygiene management (MHM) needs of the over 21 million displaced adolescent girls and women globally. Current approaches to MHM-related humanitarian programming often prioritize the provision of menstrual materials and information. However, a critical component of an MHM response includes the construction and maintenance of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities, including more female-friendly toilets.

Through a feminist approach to qualitative online survey and document analysis, this research explored how social inequalities intersected with the COVID-19 impact to shape access to WASH in developing countries while also examining the integration of gender into COVID-19 WASH interventions and policies. After describing the inspiration for this study, this article reviews relevant gender studies’ scholarship to explain why gender matters when responding to emergencies through WASH.

Fourteen years of civil war left Liberia with crumbling infrastructure and one of the weakest health systems in the world. The 2014–2015 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak exposed the vulnerabilities of the Liberian health system. Findings from the EVD outbreak highlighted the lack of infection prevention and control (IPC) practices, exacerbated by a lack of essential services such as water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in healthcare facilities.

Introduction: The major aim of hand washing promotion programs is to persuade people to change their behaviour to reduce high-risk hygiene practices and use. Unfortunately, in a refugee setting, there is a dearth of information about participation in hand washing promotion programs. Objective: To assess barriers and motivators to participation in hand washing promotion programs at household level among refugees in Rhino Camp, Arua district, Uganda.

The vulnerability of the underfunded water, sanitation, hygiene, and health (WASH2) facilities, particularly in the developing nations, is exacerbated by natural disasters. This study assessed the impacts of Amphan on the WASH2 facilities of the affected coastal areas of Bangladesh via a structured questionnaire survey, key informant interviews, and direct observation. The study reported that Amphan destroyed WASH2 facilities, where only 20% of the respondents were receiving WASH2 services afterwards. Many respondents had to rely on unsafe water sources after the cyclone hit.

In 2019, 30,000 people were forced to leave their homes due to conflict, persecution, and natural disaster each day. Eighty-five percent of refugees live in developing countries, and they often face underfunded and inadequate environmental health services. Many displaced persons live in camps and other temporary settlements long after the displacement event occurs. However, there is little evidence on environmental health conditions in the transitional phase—defined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as six months to two years after displacement.

Despite documented health benefits of household water treatment and storage (HWTS), achieving sustained use remains challenging. In prior evaluations of a long-term HWTS program in Haiti, multiple marketing interventions failed to increase use or had prohibitively high costs. Using mobile phones is a potentially cost-effective way to change HWTS behavior. We conducted a randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of sending short-message service (SMS) messages to promote household chlorination in this program in Haiti.

Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are often predisposed to infectious diseases because of the temporary nature of their abode which usually does not have adequate water and hygiene facilities. A hundred (100) samples of hand-washed water taken under aseptic conditions from the hands of the IDPs prior to the emergence of COVID-19 were analyzed using standard bacteriological procedures to determine the total plate and coliform counts, identify the bacterial isolates, and to determine their sensitivity to an array of commonly used antibiotics.

The current Sphere guideline for water chlorination in humanitarian emergencies fails to reliably ensure household water safety in refugee camps. We investigated post-distribution chlorine decay and household water safety in refugee camps in South Sudan, Jordan, and Rwanda between 2013-2015 with the goal of demonstrating an approach for generating site-specific and evidence-based chlorination targets that bet- ter ensure household water safety than the status quo Sphere guideline.