Assessment of household water handling practices and associated factors among households of Chencha District, southern Ethiopia

World Health Organization data on the burden of disease suggest that approximately 3.2% of thedeaths (1.8 million) and 4.2% of the disability-adjusted-life years (61.9 million) worldwide areattributable to unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene. The present study, therefore, aimed to assesshousehold water handling practices and associated factors among households of Chencha district,southern Ethiopia, 2017. Community based cross-sectional study design and a multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select study participants. Data was collected by trained data collectors using pretested questionnaire administered in face to face interviews after getting ethical clearance from ethical review board of Arba Minch University and informed verbal consent from participants. Data entry and clearing was made by using EpiData version 3.1 and then exported to SPSS version 20 software for analysis. Descriptive statistics such as frequency distribution and percentages was used. Crude and adjusted odds ratio was calculated in Bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions. In this study 739 respondents were asked about their household water handling practices and the response rate was 100%. The mean age of the participants was 34.62 with a standard deviation of ±8.36 years. From total respondents only 484(65.5%) exercised good water handling practices. Age of respondent (51%), hand washing after toilet (38%), and plastic bucket (16%) were some of the factors that affected safe water handling practices. So, emphasis needs to be given to behavioral change communication to create awareness on water handling practices.