The proposed project is termed 'WASHED UP' which is an acronym that stands for Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Education against Diarrhoea, Undernutrition and Pneumonia.It is an awareness program implemented in phases through a School Sensitization Campaign (School Trek) , followed by a Teacher Training Workshop aimed at creating WASH-friendly schools and clubs. This would climax with an attempt at breaking the World Record for the Largest Hand Hygiene Lesson session at one location .
Ejigbo Community is a village with an estimated population of over 500,000 people with majority of the residents from low-income families. There are two main public primary schools that are dilapidated with poor water, sanitation and hygiene facilities - toilets are barely kept clean with facilities broken and no water supply .There are no points for easy access to soap and water for handwashing and the children often play roughly spreading germs among themselves and infecting others with it.
The project will generally improve the awareness on proper sanitation and hygiene practices of the community members with a particularly focus on the 6000 children and 100 female teachers. Children will be better educated on healthy practices that improve their well-being and this would potentially prevent them and reduce the burden from infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, undernutrition and pneumonia.
With this project, we can potentially in the long run, reduce the burden of waterborne and other related childhood diseases which have been shown to be preventable by proper water, sanitation and hygiene practices. This would potentially improve the quality of life and health outcomes, especially for 6,000 children in the community. The trained teachers would be responsible for ensuring the schools remain WASH-friendly, by constantly engaging the children through the School WASH Clubs.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
