Background: Poor water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) practices, predispose to
childhood morbidity and mortality globally, and especially from diarrhoeal diseases.
Machakos County in its community strategy utilises Community Health Workers
(CHWs) to promote WASH practices and to collect household based data using a
structured reporting tool. There is no published data on WASH in Machakos County.
Objectives: To assess (i) WASH practices, and (ii) completeness and accuracy of routinely
collected data on household water, sanitation and hygiene with reported childhood
diarrhoea cases of all community units in Machakos County, Kenya.
Design: Descriptive ecological study
Setting: Machakos County, Kenya
Subjects: Household units
Results: A total of 137,540 households were served by the CHWs between January
and December 2014. The number of households was not updated as per ministry of
health recommendation, after six months hence the denominator remained constant.
There was a high uptake of households with treated drinking water (92%), availability
of hand washing facilities in (89%) and availability of functional pit latrines (98%).
A total of 4,012 diarrhoea cases were reported in the County, with an average of 90
cases every month, except in the month of August where 3,020 cases of diarrhoea were
reported. There was no apparent relationship observed between WASH practices and
occurrence of under five diarrhoea cases.
Conclusion: Water, sanitation and hygiene practices at community level in Machakos
County are in keeping with post 2015 WASH targets and indicators, with few cases of
under-five diarrhoea reported. Data quality and completeness need to be addressed
for effective programme evaluation.