Little girl practices safe hand washing

In order to be successful in our efforts to stop cholera, we need to better understand why some people adopt behaviors that stop cholera, while others do not. Although we all have pet theories on why people decide to do things based on our own anecdotal experience, we can often be wrong. To decide if vaccines and antibiotics are effective, we don’t sit around a table and guess - we would consider this highly unethical and unscientific. Yet when it comes to promoting behaviors, that’s what many projects end up doing. We need to stop the guessing, and conduct better formative research on the behavioral determinants for WASH behaviors and cholera immunization.