Organisation of a game-related festival in the town of Poirier in Low Artibonite

ion of Artibonite department in Haiti suffers from insufficient access to drinking water and latrines. The region is vulnerable to flood risks during the monsoon season, and this increases risks of water contamination. ACTED intervenes with the support of UNICEF in a region where 90% of the population drinks Artibonite river’s water. This causes frequent cases of fever and diarrhoea among children. Only about ten latrines are available for the whole population.

Improvement in drinking water access and construction of latrines are necessary to reduce the incidence of water-related diseases  but these measures are truly effective only when beneficiary populations are sensitized to good practices and knowledge about water use, hygiene and latrines management. In addition to formal awareness-raising activities such as sensitization of educators and school children, ACTED has organized an awareness-raising festival on hygiene in the town of Poirier. It brought together 800 people from civil society, local authorities and health workers.

The event included several working groups and was interrupted by recreational interludes on the same topics. Thanks to this interactive and game-based approach, a demonstration on basic hygiene principles was shown in parallel to several comical sketches illustrating daily water management.  The sensitizers trained by ACTED left the stage to Saint-Marc’s boy and girl scouts, who gave a quite festal musical interlude. Participants could also display their enthusiasm during a questions/answers session. One of them, Daniel Parron, summed up the general mood “That was a great premiere in Bocozelles. We hope that ACTED will organize this kind of experience again. Prevention on and sensitization to sanitation are essential given our low access to health care and our living conditions.”

This awareness-raising festival on hygiene helped spreading strong messages linked to the environment, health, prevention on sanitation issues and water-related risks, but in an entertaining way. Assimilation by attending representatives and community leaders of simple messages such as the importance of drinking filtered or boiled water and frequent hand-washing, is essential to a long-lasting diffusion of good practices and knowledge about hygiene within beneficiary communities.