Hygiene Practices and Prevention of Waterborne Infections for Sustainable Water Delelopment among Secondary School Students in Nkanu West L.G.A., Enugu

Abstract

The study hygiene practices and prevention of waterborne infections for sustainable water development among students in Nkanu West LGA, Enugu State. Two research questions and two hypotheses in line with specific purposes guided the study. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population for the study was 3644 secondary school students and the sample size was 360. The sample size was determined by using Taro Yamane formula, stratified sampling technique was used to sample nine schools out of twelfth secondary schools from Nkanu West LGA. The second stages involve the use of proportionate sample to sample (40) forty students from each of the nine coeducational schools that were sampled which gave the total number of 360, of this number 160(44.4%) are male and 200 (55.5%) are female. The instrument used for data collection was structured questionnaire. The instrument was validated by three experts. Kuder Richardson was used to compute the reliability while the overall reliability index was.86. Two research assistants helped to administer and collect the instrument directly from the respondents. The data collected were analyzed using frequency and percentage scores for answering the research questions while chi-square test statistics was used to test the hypotheses.  The findings of the study revealed that there was negative hygiene practices and prevention of waterborne infections among students in public secondary schools in Nkanu West and also a negative water storage practices for the prevention of waterborne infections. Since the p-value was below .05 level of significance the null hypotheses was therefore rejected. Based on the findings, the study recommended among others that sensitization and health education programme should be organized by school management to educate in-school students on the need to practice good hygiene and improve the on ways of storing water so as to help in the prevention of waterborne infections among students in public secondary schools in the study area. This may lend a help to the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs).