Toilets & Water for school children, rural India

Thanks to all your support, the project continues to work with 20 schools for maintenance of hygeine and sanitaion facilities. As always dealing with behavior change is the most challenging issues. Therefore we have conducted workshops on behaviour change and management for students to address issues related to personal and environmental hygiene. The objective of the workshop was to facilitate change in the behaviour of the students and to teach them the importance of hygiene, discipline and ill effects of bad behaviour through activities and role play.

Activities focussing on the necessity of following rules in everyday life and a role play focussing on the importance of body language and good manners were also performed by the staff. At the end the students were made to recap the learnings from the session and henceforth will be mindful of their behaviour in classrooms and in public places.  An activity to express ones feeling through writing and emotions was conducted for the students to understand the causes of behavioural patterns among the students and gain clarity of their deep seated beliefs.

Awareness sessions were conducted in all the project schools on menstrual hygiene.  The students were taken through a very structured speech on self confidence, fun activities to engage the students, awareness speech on menstrual hygiene with video clips, quiz on awareness speech, self-defense tips and  sanitation kit distribution.

Thanks to all the support from donors, we are continuing to run a sustainable program to bring about better hygiene practices among children.  A total of 15 Sanitation Workers have been placed in the schools maintain the sanitation facilities at the school and to keep them clean and hygienic.

The schools are supplemented with cleaning materials. In order to further strengthen the commitment and motivation of the sanitation workers, Best Sanitation Worker is chosen every month and felicitated with a gift. Repair and maintenance of the toilets at 3 of the schools has been done this year. Clean drinking water provision has been given through Reverse Osmosis filtration systems. Water drums have been provided this year to collect and store purified water. Annual cleaning and maintenance of the water tanks at the schools was also done.

The initiative has to promote handwashing habit among children has seen good success. Handwashing soap has been provided to each school and the para teachers have been facilitating handwashing with soap before lunch and after toileting.'

The children wash their hands with soap before eating and after using toilets. The initiative has been successful and the students wash their hands twice a day with soap. A Hygiene-Sanitation Survey conducted to understand the impact of the interventions suggests 70% and 80% of the students surveyed wash their hands 3 or more times a day with soap.

Health classes are conducted by the Kalanjiyam Nurse in 12 of the schools on a monthly basis where she also focuses on reinforcing the messages on proper toileting, hand-washing and keeping body clean, use of slippers, and boiling water before drinking etc. alongside the topic of the day. The Kalanjiyam staff too keep reinforcing these messages to the children whenever possible to bring about a positive change in personal hygiene behaviours.