Access to clean water, soap, and knowledge of good hygiene practices helps women and girls maintain good health throughout their lives.
What is this research about?
This brief looks at how a lack of clean water, safe toilets, and soap (WASH) causes dangerous infections such as diarrheal disease for adolescent girls, new mothers, and young children in low-resource homes, schools, and hospitals. It explores how public health systems can combine reliable infrastructure with community care to protect these groups from preventable illness, preserve human dignity, and promote health equity.
Why does it matter?
Without clean water and safe toilets, preventable illnesses such as childhood diarrhea threaten the survival of infants, and adolescent girls can miss school because private facilities are lacking. Investing in reliable WASH infrastructure, and not education alone, allows local health workers to deliver safer maternal care and advances global goals for health, clean water, and gender equality.
This brief draws on public health data, descriptive studies, and global agency guidelines that show strong associations between clean water access and reduced infant illness. The underlying evidence has limits: it mostly tracks individual behavior, not the effects of community-wide infrastructure. Where the evidence shows an association, this piece describes it as an association, not a proven cause.
What the evidence found Finding
- Menstrual health. Menstrual health programs that combine private, water-equipped toilets with affordable supplies protect health and dignity and help adolescent girls remain in school.
- Infant feeding. Lack of breastfeeding and unhygienic formula preparation are strongly associated with childhood diarrheal illness, poor nutrition, and infant mortality.
- Child health. Handwashing with soap, improved community sanitation, and hygienic food preparation reduce the spread of illness among young children.
- Maternal recovery. Safe running water in maternity clinics is essential for health workers to maintain basic infection prevention practices and reduce sepsis risk during childbirth.
Interpretation note. These are findings from a policy brief that draws on existing public health sources. They point to strong associations but do not show how much any single intervention reduces illness.
What this could mean Interpretation
These findings suggest that governments and health providers need to move from simply telling individuals to wash their hands to actively funding community water infrastructure, school toilets, and clean maternity clinics.
What does this mean for...
Managing menstruation, postpartum recovery, and safe infant feeding can be a challenge in areas that lack clean water and private bathrooms. Regular handwashing and hygienic food preparation can reduce further risk, and breastfeeding can reduce risks for infants.
Families and communities can advocate for handwashing stations, access to clean water and soap in schools, and menstrual products. Communities can also host events teaching hygienic bathroom and food preparation practices and safe infant feeding, and encourage breastfeeding.
Policymakers can help by funding water and sanitation infrastructure, embedding WASH into existing maternal health initiatives, and ensuring that schools and health facilities comply with hygiene standards.
What do we still need to know?
We do not yet have precise data on how much disease WASH interventions reduce, on the regional and local barriers to putting them in place, or on the costs of investing in plumbing infrastructure, because these things depend heavily on location.
Meet the researcher
Kendra Smith
Kendra Smith is a public health professional and emerging researcher completing her B.S. in Public Health at Southern New Hampshire University. Her interests include maternal and child health, WASH, infectious disease prevention, health equity, and the Sustainable Development Goals. Her work is grounded in an interest in community-centered approaches to public health and the translation of research into accessible, actionable health information.
This brief proposes a mix of education and WASH infrastructure as ways to support female health from adolescence through childbearing.
This piece is written for general education and reflects a plain-language interpretation of the preprint. It does not replace guidance from a qualified healthcare provider.