The global sanitation workforce bridges the gap between sanitation infrastructure and the provision of sanitation services through essential public service work, with informal sanitation workers often performing the work at the cost of their dignity, safety, and health as their work requires repeated heavy physical activities such as lifting, carrying, pulling, and pushing (9). Without the capacity building of informal workers, informal dwellers face an increasingly unhealthy, unstable future and poor access to quality sanitation services (10,11). In addition, increased poverty levels experienced in these areas reduces access to safe protective gear used by sanitation workers while handling waste mater/cleaning the facilities (12). This may expose them to a wide range of disease-causing pathogens which could otherwise be prevented through awareness creation/knowledge dissemination.
Capacity building of informal sanitation workers is usually unrecognized and undervalued, yet, it increases work ethics, allows individuals to advocate for their ideas, and offers a format to gather advice or guidance based on the community’s expertise and experiences (14,15). Also, analyzing the level of hand contamination among these groups, which is also under-researched, may increase usage/amplify the need to use protective gear while they are working thus minimizing exposure levels to disease-causing pathogens.
Capacity building of informal sanitation workers on these community-identified sanitation best practices could also act as a natural step in the push to get community stakeholders involved in charting the course towards better sanitation service delivery, and for enhanced responsiveness in sanitation service delivery.
The rationale is not only that the bottom-up approach is vital to supplement top-down efforts, but it is also to test how useful and effective providing participatory evidence would empower community efforts for quality sanitation services in Korogocho and Viwandani informal settlements, Nairobi.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ivy-Chumo

• Africa

• Women
• The poor

Future funding will enable the project team to implement the digital technologies for capability building in other informal settlements in Africa and in other LMICs

"Desk review We will review literature related to levels of hand-contamination and capacity building of informal sanitation workers in informal settlements. This will help us understand and plan better on pathogen exposure and capacity-building mechanisms as approaches to improving sanitation facilities, practices, and behaviour change. Data collection We will develop an observation schedule for recording the status of sanitation services and practices offered by informal sanitation facility cleaners. This will be administered to informal sanitation workers working in 60 sanitation facilities from two slum communities where the study will be implemented. To assess the health risks as a result of exposure to disease-causing pathogens (E.coli, Salmonella spp, Shigella spp), hand-rinse samples will also be collected from the informal sanitation workers in both settlements during their normal working days, processed, and analyzed. This will be done to assess microbial load and suggest interventions that could work best during the capacity-building sessions. Intervention We will be inviting community-organized groups to submit proposals showcasing how they intend to use their innovations to empower sanitation workers and use these iterations to engage larger communities through their own unique creative public outreach channels. All groups who will apply will be invited for in-person pitches to counter the initial fear that per custom, they would lose out to more visible groups that work in the slums. The presentations will help identify cross-linkages for possible partnerships and to sharpen their work plans if successful. Panel scoring and feedback would recommend the engagement of two groups (1 in each study site)."