A Comparative Study of the Efficacy of Community Health Clubs in Rural Areas of Vietnam and Zimbabwe to Control Diarrhoeal Disease

Juliet Waterkeyn, Nguyen Huy Nga and Victor K. Nyamandi

A chapter in Rural Health from IntechOpen

Abstract: The Community Health Club (CHC) Model in Makoni District, Zimbabwe operated 265 CHCs with 11,600 members from 1999 to 2001 at a cost of US$0.63 per beneficiary per annum. A decade later, 48 CHCs were started in three districts in Vietnam with 2,929 members at a cost of US$1.30. Hygiene behaviour change was compared using a similar survey of observable proxy indicators in both projects, before and after intervention. In Vietnam there was a mean of 36% change in 16 observable proxy indicators (p > 0.001) which compared positively with Makoni where there was a mean of 23% hygiene change in 10 indicators (p > 0.001). In Vietnam, 8 Health Centers reported a reduction of 117 cases of diarrhoeal diseases in CHC communes, compared to only 24 in non-CHC communes in one year; in 8 Health Centers in Makoni, Zimbabwe, a reduction of 1,219 reported cases over a 2-9 year period was reported, demonstrating the efficacy of CHC both in African and Asian context. We suggest that regular government data of reported cases at clinics may be a more reliable method than self-reported diarrhoea by carers in clustered-Randomised Control Trials, which have surprised practitioners by finding negligible impact of WASH interventions on diarrhoea in rural communities.

Keywords: community health club; hygiene behaviour change; sanitation; Vietnam; Zimbabwe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/76069 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:229430

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.97142

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().