After years of debate, most people working in water and sanitation now agree that hygiene promotion is vitally important. But even now, many programmes either ignore it or do it badly. This field note describes two African hygiene promotion programmes that have successfully used new approaches: Saniya in burkina Faso and ZimAHEAD in Zimbabwe. Both programmes concentrated on understanding how people actually hehave and hence hot to change that behaviour. Both programmes demonstrated ideas that can be applied at a larger scale. Changin human hygiene behaviour is a long process that is difficult to measure and both of these programmes still have obstacles to overcome. However, this work indicates that systematic and carefully managed hygiene promotion programmes can achieve improvement in hygiene behaviour and hence reduction in diarrhoeal diseases
