Behavioural specialists BreadCrumbs created five helpful posters for washing hands, each one is in a South African language, you can print and use them.
South Africa (13 March 2020) – BreadCrumbs have made three posters about washing your hands. The Behavioural Linguistics company hope that by creating posters in different languages, more people will take washing their hands seriously.
The company knows that humans can be lazy when it comes to handwashing. They said as humans we sometimes need prompts in order to remember what to do. Although most people wash their hands, it’s often not done for long enough. To help cue people to wash their hands and to do this for the appropriate amount of time, BreadCrumbs uses behavioural principles that nudge action.
“As new cases of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) are reported around the world and in South Africa, we need to know how to protect ourselves, and others, by preventing the spread of the virus.
The most important advice from the World Health Organisation is to wash our hands, often, and properly. What this means is washing our hands when we arrive at work and when we get home, whenever we cough or sneeze, and especially when using the bathroom and before handling food or eating.
When washing our hands, it’s critical to do so for long enough – with the global recommendation to wash your hands with soap for a full 20 seconds.”
“As with all things, we’re creatures of habit and we don’t like effort. It’s unlikely we’ve formed the 20-second-hand-wash habit, and if it’s not already ingrained into our daily behaviour, we all have to make a special effort to get this right.
When we’re standing in front of a basin or in a public bathroom or kitchen, we need a visual cue to remind us about how important handwashing is.
Using a Behavioural Linguistics approach that combines elements of language use with behavioural science, we’ve put together free, downloadable posters for you to use.”
For now, the posters are only in Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sesotho but the company have asked anyone wanting one in their own language, to please email them here.
You can find all the printable posters here.
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