This year’s Menstrual Hygiene Day celebration is all about women’s empowerment. In many countries, women and girls’ participation in education and public life is severely curtailed when they have their periods. Empowering women and girls is a key goal of USAID’s efforts to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) conditions in communities around the world.
Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a revolutionary idea and an inspiring practice. The enthusiasm of its many adherents in government and civil society is understandable. This desk review examines the refereed and gray literature on CLTS,1 with the central objective of assessing the knowledge base on best practices and identifying evidence gaps to inform the project’s research agenda (to generate findings that improve policy and practice).
Menstrual Hygiene Day (MH Day), May 28, is an annual global event to raise awareness about the challenges women and girls face due to menstruation and to highlight solutions that address these challenges. MH Day also provides a platform to advocate for making menstrual hygiene management (MHM) a part of local, national, and global policies, as well as programs, projects, and activities across global development sectors. MH Day is organized by WASH United, which has run the event since its inception in 2013.
May 5, 2018 marked World Hand Hygiene Day, an annual awareness day and call to action for promoting hand hygiene in health care. This year’s theme was “It’s in your hands—prevent sepsis in health care.” Sepsis—when the body’s response to infection causes injury to its own tissues and organs—affects more than 30 million patients every year worldwide and leads to an estimated 6 million deaths. Proper hand hygiene is a critical step to preventing sepsis and providing quality health care.
