There is an increasing global recognition that school-aged girls face challenges in sufficiently managing their menstrual hygiene, which affects their educational attainment and psychosocial well-being. There is limited information on the challenges that girls face in relation to menstruation in Eritrea or the impacts that cultural beliefs and practices have on girls’ ability to manage their menstruation while in school.

Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is a widely used, community-based approach to tackle open defecation and its health-related problems. Although CLTS has been shown to be successful in previous studies, little is known about how CLTS works.

In Nigeria, diarrheal diseases are the third leading cause of mortality, accounting for over 75,000 deaths of children aged 1-59 months in 2015 (WHO, 2016).  From 2012 to 2016, Action Against Hunger worked with local authorities to trigger 138 communities in Yobe State, Northern Nigeria, using the Community-Led Total Sanitation methodology. The objective of this approach is to empower the community to realise the negative impacts of open defecation on health and well-being, and thus mobilise itself to eliminate open defecation and improve sanitation with limited external intervention.

Diarrhoea and growth faltering in early childhood are associated with subsequent adverse outcomes. This trial aimed to assess whether water quality, sanitation, and handwashing interventions alone or combined with nutrition interventions reduced diarrhoea or growth faltering. Overall the trial found that nutrient counselling and supplementation modestly improved linear growth, but that there was no benefit to the integration of water, sanitation, and handwashing with nutrition.