Approval Date: 2012

Improving water quality, hygiene practices, and excreta disposal are all important in reducing disease transmission. Furthermore, evidence also suggests that combined improvements to all activities have a greater impact on disease transmission than the sum of their activity. Improving hygiene practices often involves greater water usage and it is therefore important that a hygiene promotion strategy is integrated with the overall sector policies and strategies to improve access to safe drinking water supply and sanitation. Hygiene promotion includes strategies that encourage or facilitate a process whereby people assess, make considered choices, demand, effect, and sustain hygienic and healthy behaviors. This encompasses personal, domestic, and environmental hygiene practices and any action or initiative taken to erect barriers to diseases. In this strategy paper, the 'Hygiene Promotion' is considered particularly related to water supply and sanitation. The objective of the national hygiene promotion strategy is to promote sustainable use of improved water supply and sanitation infrastructures and to create an enabling environment ensuring comprehensive hygiene promotion and practices to reduce water and sanitation-related diseases.