32 girl-friendly schools in Bolivia

In this update, we wanted to provide a short overview on what happened over the past 4 months in our project “32 girl-friendly schools in Bolivia”. 

Trainings:

Staff of the SODIS Foundation has been working hard with the local teachers. In total, 146 teachers were trained in important topics related to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene. So far, we reached the equivalent to 64% of the target set for the project, and the trainings continue.

In three schools where the teachers already have been trained, they started to implement a series of workshops for the pupils, with the support of experts from the SODIS Foundation. During these workshops, we were able to speak about how to facilitate and support healthy habits like water disinfection, hand washing at key moments (before eating and after using the bathroom) and proper use of bathrooms.

Healthy habits:

In each classroom, the teachers and pupils jointly installed a corner with safe drinking water (SODIS water bottles and jerry cans of 20 liters with chlorinated water). In some schools, they started the production of handmade soap, which is a very interesting approach to make sure that soap will be available in the future, even after the official end of our project.

Institutionalization:

Project staff, in cooperation with school managers, set up a Safe Water Committee in each school. The committees are composed of student representatives and one or two teachers.  These committees are responsible for monitoring the healthy practices at school.

Sanitation: 

Meanwhile, we analyzed the conditions for the construction of ecological dry toilets in five educational units. In these schools, there is not enough water to run traditional flush-toilets, and ecological dry toilets have been identified as the best technological option. Currently, we are in the design phase of these unit, and construction will start in the next few weeks. Furthermore, we are in the process of identifying local leaders (men and women) who will help us in the next phase of the project, when we want to bring the healthy habits from the schools to the whole community.

Conclusion:

In general the project is advancing well and according to the plans. If you think this report was useful to you, please share it with your friends and family. Please also let us know if you want more specific information, or if you have other suggestions on how to improve our work.

Best regards from the whole project team,

Matthias Saladin

Links:

• New website of the SODIS Foundation