Standard Reporting Guidelines for Hygiene and WASH Implementation

There are several challenges related to comparability, replicability, and generalizability of WASH intervention evaluations. WASH interventions include contextual considerations, infrastructure, behavior change, implementation strategies, and implementation fidelity that are not clearly or consistently reported. This limits accurate interpretation and the ability to draw conclusions with strong external validity. Inconsistencies in reporting could be remedied by the development and adoption of standardized reporting guidelines. Accurate and consistent reporting of hygiene interventions and implementation would facilitate comparisons of interventions effectiveness and impact, adaptation and scale, and cost-benefit analysis of public health investment strategies.

With funds from the Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute, we aim to develop and operationalize a gold-standard, easily adoptable approach for how researchers, policymakers, and practitioners report the implementation and context of hygiene and WASH interventions to support comparisons across studies, programs, and contexts. The primary output for this work will be the finalization of a standard guidance document – and associated reporting checklist – with a complementary toolkit to provide definitional terms and guidance on how to complete the checklist.

Our approach to develop and operationalize a toolkit to standardize reporting of hygiene and WASH interventions will be done in five iterative steps:

  1. Review of implementation reporting guidelines from other public health and medical sectors to identify an initial set of key reporting domains.

  2. Scoping review of WASH literature to identify and characterize current reporting approaches and shortfalls. This will review will focus on the most cited WASH articles from the last 10 years, supplemented by examples of good reporting recommended by WASH sector experts.

  3. Stakeholder engagement and expert consensus to prioritize, refine, and define a list “elements of implementation” to include in the guidance document. This process will begin at the 2022 UNC Water & Health conference during our side event, and continue remotely following the conference.

  4. Pilot testing the reporting checklist and developing case studies to include in the reporting toolkit.

  5. Finalize the guidance document, incorporating lessons learned from piloting.

Conferences:

  1. 2022 UNC Water and Health Conference: October 27 (Thursday) Side Event “Developing an evidence-based WASH implementation reporting guideline”

    • Download the calendar invite here

 

Timeline

2022-2023

Principal Investigators

Emory University: Matthew Freeman

Funders

Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute

 

Project Staff

Jonny Crocker, Emily Ogutu Awino, Jedidiah Snyder

Expert Panel

Antoinette Kome, Ben Tidwell, Jan Willem Rosenboom, Jesse Shapiro, Jessy Samuyachi Mahongo, Kelly T Alexander, Mike Gnilo, Om Prasad Gautam, Sara Hoffman, Sovattha Neou