Wash those germs away

Our first visit this morning was to a primary school in Govindpuri, again in South Delhi, to see Save the Children’s WASH programme in action. We’d already heard a little about it in yesterday’s briefing – it’s part of their effort to improve child health. The programme which has been put in place is a simple scheme which has shown itself to be effective through a massive drop in illness, and as a result the government want to extend it to other areas.

The school is attended by children from a slum similar to the one we attended yesterday morning – girls attend in the morning, and boys in the afternoon, about 500 for each session. There was already a toilet block and a hand-washing station at the school, but they were poorly designed and poorly maintained. Save the Children redesigned the facilities to make them child-friendly (e.g. hand basins at different heights for different years), improved the maintenance, and also worked with the teachers so that they have built hand-washing into their daily routines. The children have taken these lessons back to their families so that they are benefiting too. Another essential part of the programme is to empower the children to take on the responsibility to report any problems with the facilities. We were told a lovely story of how a group of 15 small children stood in the school assembly to tell the rest of the school “If we will not clean it, who will clean it!”

The girls we met made us feel very welcome – you will love the welcome dance they performed for us (see it on https://youtu.be/BgA2nM6XZxE). They showed off their hand washing routine and hand washing song proudly, and they were delighted to tell us why all this was so important. They asked for our autographs, smiled and played. We could have stayed there all morning but there were other important things to see.

Next we walked down the road to a nearby Anganwadi centre (a government provided centre to combat child hunger and malnutrition). This centre is definitely not grand – a room only about 10 feet square – but they are a centre for the community. Again pushing the hand washing message, STC designed and built a very basic facility so that the residents can wash their hands in clean water within the centre. They have built 10 of these, and the government now wants to extend their use to 11,000 Anganwadi centres. That’s some vote of confidence! The local women were enthusiastic about the impact of these sort of improvements – the main spokeswoman (a real dynamo!) told us how they used to “clean” their hands with dust – apparently a practice brought with them from their old villages. And she was very clear that the incidence of diarrhoea and illness has reduced significantly.

These two visits both reinforced the impression from yesterday about how Save the Children are working. They see things that don’t work, come up with innovations that will help and at the same time they work to empower the communities. These are not glamorous projects, but they do seem to be effective.