India : school sanitation and hygiene education : school sanitation support (SSS) project : a proposal

India has experience of school sanitation programmes primarily centred around hardware: toilet blocks and water sources. School sanitation programmes have been centred around hardware and has not been impressive. This usually led to a situation where facilities were not maintained and used. Neither was there any component of hygiene & health education in the design to support the hardware component. As a result, planned investments were often not used effectively and there was little demonstrable impact. To assist State Governments to improve this situation, UNICEF and Government of India now plan to develop a school sanitation support project that includes a well balanced mix of hardware and software aspects.

Through this support project, UNICEF and Government will collaborate to develop, test and successfully demonstrate replicable models for hygiene education, water supply and environmental sanitation in rural primary schools and pre-schools, building on the past experiences in UNICEF Government collaboration in school sanitation. The support project will have the IRC, International Water and Sanitation Centre, Netherlands as a key partner who will provide technical and resource support with an emphasis on participatory methodologies.

The project will focus initially on four districts in two/three States, covering approximately 500 primary schools and 250 Anganwadi centres per district. Implementation of the project will centre on School Sanitation and Hygiene Education (SSH) teams. The project will include capacity strengthening of all stakeholders involved.

The overall objective of the project is to develop, test and successfully demonstrate a replicable model for hygiene education, water supply and environmental sanitation in rural primary schools and pre-schools. Specific objectives are:

• to make visible the value and impact of school sanitation as perceived by community and thereby raise level of ownership.
• to promote the importance of school sanitation at national, state, and district levels;
• to improve hygiene practices in school children and through children in the families and community;
• to develop, test, establish and improve curriculum, teaching aids and teaching programmes;
• to promote family and community involvement in the sustainability of water and sanitation facilities in schools.