Welcome to the fifth issue of the COVID-19 Hygiene Hub News Bulletin. Our big news this week is that we’ve launched a new and exciting feature of the Hygiene Hub, known as the COVID-19 Hygiene Hub Forum! You can also read about the launch of the WHO & UNICEF-led Hand Hygiene for All Initiative, learn what questions we’ve most frequently been asked in the last two weeks and how we’ve responded to them, or check out the new and updated resources for COVID-19 response.

The COVID-19 Hygiene Hub Forum is a platform where organisations and individuals implementing COVID-19 response programmes can ask questions, post resources and share case studies. This community discussion forum allows you to interact with one another and learn from similar successes and challenges across the world. It’s also moderated by Hygiene Hub staff, as well as staff from our Steering Committee member organisations, to ensure discussions are dynamic and draw on evidence where available.

In particular this week, the World Health Organisation is keen to receive your input on the Country Roadmap and Global Framework documents underpinning the newly launched Hand Hygiene for All Initiative.

The platform is accessible to all organisations, and we encourage you to sign up via Knowledge Point here. You can also access the main COVID-19 Hygiene Hub website.

The Hand Hygiene for All Global Initiative, co-led by WHO and UNICEF, launched last Friday, and the COVID-19 Hygiene Hub is proud to be a core partner! The Hand Hygiene for All Global Initiative aims to implement the WHO’s global recommendations on hand hygiene to prevent and control the COVID-19 pandemic and work to ensure lasting infrastructure and hand hygiene behaviour.

This WHO and UNICEF-led initiative calls for countries to lay out comprehensive roadmaps that bridge together national COVID-19 preparedness and response plans with mid- and long-term national development plans to ensure hand hygiene is a mainstay beyond the pandemic. It also proposes a framework for coordination and collaboration among global and regional partners, with the primary aim of supporting and growing country-led efforts and investments. You can read more about the initiative here.

Common enquiries this past week included:

Please see our resource article on masks updated with the latest evidence on masks here

If you would like to know more about designing hygiene programmes, please see our resource document on Hygiene Programming for COVID-19 response here.

In response to web enquiries and discussions with partner organisations, we have continued to develop and revise our resource documents on a range of topics related to COVID-19 response.
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Resources we have updated with new evidence this and last week include:

Want to access other resources or these resources in other languages? Click here

If you have requests or ideas for future resources, please email us at support@hygienehub.info.

Well Beyond is a consulting and technology company that has been building an app to support communities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with their rural water supply systems. In response to COVID-19, we made a sharp pivot to modify the app to provide training on preventive behaviours like hygiene and sanitation.

Their COVID-19 Response App provides a series of interactive training modules. It is designed to fill the gap between high-level national recommendations and the tools and knowledge that are available in remote, rural places. The app contains information on disease transmission, creating hand washing stations, making face masks, disinfection within homes and improving sanitation. The app also offers real-time support via chat. For more details, see our full case study here.

And in case you missed these, we’ve delivered a series of webinars in partnership with the Global Wash Cluster providing an overview of the Hygiene Hub and discussing ways of working with our global network of partners. Listen to English, Spanish, French or Arabic recordings of the webinar and access the Q&A.