Sustainability of a water, sanitation and hygiene education project in rural Bangladesh: a 5-year follow-up.

An integrated water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WSH) education intervention project was run by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, over the period 1983-87. In the intervention area the project provided handpumps, pit latrines, and hygiene education to about 800 households. The control population did not receive any interventions, but had access to the usual government and private WSH facilities. After 1987 no external support was provided to maintain these provisions. A cross-sectional follow-up survey, which was carried out in 1992, involved about 500 randomly selected households from the intervention and control areas. In 1992 about 82% of the pumps were still in good functional condition and of these, 94% had been functioning well in 1987. Fewer latrines…