![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65cc95ae14cce67e88519084/74efc6df-f02f-4705-9822-b5efa96b2f1e/WASH+Main+combined+1.png)
WASH
Water, Sanitation, Hygiene
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.
LIVE FROM THE LATRINE: CLIP
Mr Poop is someone we meet every day, but when did you last see him interviewed? On-the-spot reporter Kabii Kabooka Kibing is live at the latrine today to hear, from the horse’s mouth as it were, if people really do what they say they do and wash their hands when – and there’s a song for this – it’s on your fingers, on your thumb, sticky poop, from your bum...
TIME TO WASH: CLIP
Taban’s daughter is sick and he’s spent all morning holding her so she can relieve herself (she has diarrhoea). Wash his hands? Don’t give him wash your hands! It’s only baby poop and he’s quite enough to do thank you very much! Taban, stumbling into the bushes himself the next day (another bad idea…), learns the hard way about the vital role of proper latrine use and hand washing with soap.
THE AMAZING MACHINE: CLIP
The city streets are choked with rubbish. Gerard and Francis are playing when a strange character arrives with a machine – an Amazing Machine! For its magic to work they must feed it, so they fill it with plastic, paper and whatever’s lying around. There’s a special place too for poop – a latrine. In time, the magic reveals itself: a beautiful space, and cleaner water! But… maybe the machine wasn’t magic… maybe the power was in the two boys.