Long before the poop emoji, No Strings came up with Mr Poop, the puppet with a lot of personality made from a sock. Mr Poop gets on your hands in tiny traces whenever you pay a ‘long call’. Then, through touching, eating, etc, he will eventually arrive in your mouth. Or someone else’s poop will.

Hand washing with soap prevents this, but is rarely top of the agenda for busy children - or adults. While half a million child deaths annually are caused by diarrhoea (WHO), humans can be remarkably blasé. Right now, we think, this is not a priority, and it probably won’t happen anyway.

Fortunately, as well as disgusting, children more often than not find poop amusing. Our framework uses puppet films and a plague of physical puppets in an approach shaped by up-to-date behavioural research that attracts children like swarms of flies to a, well, a poop, and they learn together though play.

Scroll for clips of three of our WASH films: Time to WASH, made for audiences all over sub-Saharan Africa; the more urban The Amazing Machine, piloted in Haiti and shared in Sierra Leone and Kenya, which incorporates solid waste messages; and Live from the Latrine, two short films for social media dissemination in Zimbabwe and beyond.