Effect of iec interventions in wash to promote hand washing practices among primary school children in Kasongo Municipality, DRC
International Journal of Development Research
Effect of iec interventions in wash to promote hand washing practices among primary school children in Kasongo Municipality, DRC
Received 02nd September, 2022; Received in revised form 21st September, 2022; Accepted 29th October, 2022; Published online 30th November, 2022
Copyright©2022, Ali Omari Mwana Yamba Aloma et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Poor personal hygiene and lack of knowledge about hand washing, leads to communicable diseases. Personal hygiene plays a major role to promote healthy life. The objective of this study is to promote hand washing and practices among primary school children in the Kasongo Municipality, Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a cross sectional descriptive study conducted on 294 school children of Kasongo municipality. All the students were interviewed with a structured questionnaire (pretest). A visual display of good and bad personal hygiene was shown on projector and explained the benefits of good personal hygiene behavior that can be gained through the IEC interventions in WASH. Again, structured questionnaire was given (posttest). As results, most of the school children belonged to the 9 – 11 years age group (35.0%). The knowledge of the school children regarding the importance of hand washing was 92.9% in posttest as compared to 56.5% in pretest. The main reason for washing hands to prevent diseases is shown by 60.5% in posttest as compared to 37.8% in pretest. Being ever educated on hand washing was 71.8% in posttest compared to 46.3% in pretest. Washing hands with soap with someone pouring little clean water was considered as a part of personal hygiene by 43.2% in posttest as compared to 39.6% in pretest. Knowledge about using ash in critical times instead of soap was 73.1% as compared to 28.6% in pretest. Only 20.0% of school children had the habits to wash their hands when in school (pretest) while 73.8% (posttest) children were aware of this fact. Most of children washed their hands with soap after using toilet (75.9%) in posttest compared to 39.2% in pretest. Washing hands with soap when they are dirty was stated in 64.6% in posttest compared to 43.5% in pretest. Overall trend of knowledge and practice about personal hygiene was in poor conditions among school children at the time of pretest. Posttest results were highly satisfactory.
