2006 Waterkeyn
Waterkeyn, J. (2006)
Scaling up Community Health Clubs: An Appeal to Funding Agencies.
ABSTRACT: It is now over a decade since the first Community Health Clubs were started and their effectiveness in creating a demand for sanitation and rapid uptake of recommended hygiene practices is beginning to be appreciated in the academic world following recent research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Waterkeyn and Cairncross, 2005). Looking at comparative programmes it is clear that Community Health Clubs are one of the most cost-effective methodologies for achieving hygiene behaviour change in rural areas of Africa (WSP. 2004), and that the highest rate of change can be expected in the less developed areas. In 2004, Africa AHEAD Association was founded by the author, to replicate and adapt the CHC Approach throughout Africa by starting pilot projects in as many countries as possible to provide first hand models for the development community. The following three examples show the ability of this methodology to go to scale and challenge development agencies to provide resources to scale up this proven methodology in order to meet the MDG targets for water and sanitation.