Evaluation of SWASH: Has it addressed menstrual health and management challenges facing school girls in Muheza district?
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Date
2019
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Mzumbe University
Abstract
Introduction: Many countries especially in Africa and Asia lack menstrual hygienic facilities in public places especially in schools where it is needed the most. At least 500 million” females, both women and young girls, do not have access to adequate facilities as part of managing menstrual hygiene (World Bank, 2018). This goes in hand to low level of MHHM understanding among both girls and boys. Hence this evaluation study aimed at ascertaining MHHM awareness among girls, schools’ adherence to SWASH MHHM guidelines, school boys peer support, availability of funds for implementation, implementers’ commitment and responsiveness to challenges and socio demographic and geographic factors affecting MHHM knowledge among school girls.
Methodology: The study was a concurrent mixed method with analytical cross sectional study design where a formative evaluation approach was employed to ascertain contribution of SWASH project in addressing MHHM related challenges facing school girls in Muheza district. 8 private and government secondary schools were purposely selected where 503 respondents were involved out of which, 458 girls were used as quantitative sample while 42 girls students were selected for in depth interviews out of quantitative sample, 5 FGD’s each comprised 8 girls’ students, 3 FGD’s for boys each comprised 8 students, 16 teachers and 5 District Managers were used in this study as a part of qualitative sample. Data were quantitatively analyzed with the help of Stata 13, Python and QGIS for geospatial analyses. Qualitative analysis involved content analysis technique with the help of Atlas ti.
Results: it was found that none of 8 schools has met 100% MHHM requirements as envisaged, mean students ratio per pit hole were observed to be 52 with the worst situation in government schools (>100 for some schools). Operations and maintenance was another challenge where non availability of soaps, emergency pads, water and dilapidated infrastructure were prevalent in government schools. Age were observed to have a weak positive relationship to students’ performance (r=0.35) while menstrual experience years modrate (r=0.52). “Form II”, “Form III” and “Form IV” are 1.04, 1.36 and 1.39 respectively times likely to have desirable awareness level (>= 50%) compared to “Form I” (p>0.05). primary and secondary level educated mothers are 10% and 6% less likely to have desirable MHHM understanding compared to university educated mothers (p=0.732 and 0.33 respectively) whereas Mothers who have not gone to school are 80% less likely to have a good understanding level than University/College mothers (p=0.033).
Conclusion: Unreliable funds, lack of awareness on SWASH project, poor sectorial coordination and non-consideration of MHHM issues as vital are major challenges impinging smooth implementation of SWASH project. Considerable measures are to viii be taken by government and project designers in areas of scale up, implementation and progress monitoring so as to ensure achievement of envisioned outcomes. recording and data reporting tools in the health facilities, despite that tools are available but still the quality of data remained doubtful due to data disparities observed in the documentary review across different level of response. Family planning data quality assessment is only performed at the District and in the Region level but rarely and improperly conducted at facility levels due to some observed challenges like inadequate knowledge for FP DQA, lack of skilled team, lack of standardized data quality assessment tools, mistrust of data collectors at different levels, data manipulation to fulfil donors requirements, parallel reporting and report overburden at the health facilities.
Description
A dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for award of the Master of Science in Health Monitoring and Evaluation (MSc. HM&E) of Mzumbe University
Keywords
Menstrual health and management, Menstrual hygiene, Family planning data qualityt, menstrual hygienic facilities, SWASH MHHM guidelines
Citation
APA