SWASH

Kenyan schoolchildren show off their new “SWASH Champion” Calendars, part of a student and family engagement strategy of the project.

Please see CARE USA’s recently released project updates on gui²de‘s SWASH program below:

This randomized evaluation tests innovative strategies for enhancing governance and information management systems in Kenyan primary schools to improve the sustainability of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services.  On the one hand, we seek to assist the Ministry of Education to adopt at scale a cell phone-based Education Management Information System (EMIS) that will help improve the collection of reliable school-level information for planning and management purposes.  In addition, we test two potentially complementary strategies to enhance school governance and to improve incentives and performance of school managers with respect to the provision of WASH services: first, we reach out to families to motivate them to demand better WASH facilities for their children, distributing provocative and educational calendars to 36,000 households; and second, we deploy a mobile phone platform that allows parents to rate and share school performance, thereby exerting community-level pressure on administrators.