Toilets & Water for school children, rural India

The project has been continuing to support all the schools for maintainance of the hygiene facilities. In the last quarter,nearly half of the school toilets went through the six monthy cleaning and followed by fixing repairs. Each school sanitation worker are motivated each month to do their best to keep the toilets and school enironment clean.

Promoting hygiene and sanitation practices among the students continued to be a major challenge in the projects schools despite continued engagement in the areas. Therefore, targeted interventions have been made in the project schools depending upon needs and specific problems.

Promoting Hand Washing: Washing one’s hands regularly is a very important hygiene practice which contributes greatly to good health. The children had been encouraged to wash their hands regularly by the teachers as well as the project staff. The project has provided hand washing liquid to the students. The initiative has been successful due to the full cooperation of teachers and interest of the students and students wash their hands thrice a day. The authorities at the project schools have also been consulted about the possibility of provision of soap for hand washing and discussions are going on about the same.

Improving Classroom Cleanliness: In order to encourage children keep their classroom clean  competitions called are held ‘Clean Classroom Champions of the Week’ - this has been initiated wherein the classroom that is the cleanest during the course of the week will receive a rolling trophy. The trophy changes hands each week. This has been successful and slow changes in student attitude towards littering and cleanliness has been seen.

Improving Personal Hygiene of Children : In order to improve the level of personal hygiene among the students in some schools which were observed to be relatively worse off in this area, a system of stars for good turnout and black dots for poor turnout everyday has been started. At the end of the month, one girl and one boy from each class with the maximum stars were felicitated with a prize. This has promoted more students to follow hygienic practices every day and coming to school in prop

Best Hygiene and Sanitation worker: It was observed that the toilets in some schools were not being cleaned regularly. In order to improve the situation, a competition for the best hygiene-sanitation worker at the school was announced.

Poster Competition: A poster competition on personal hygiene practices was organised in some schools as part of the drawing competitions. Students are making posters in groups on various aspects of personal hygiene. The competition resulted in prizes and the winning posters were displayed in the school