The Rani Lower Primary School in Assam’s Kamrup district in the outskirts of Guwahati is somewhat of an exception. Every day, before the midday meals are about to begin in the government school, the children are guided out in queues in front of a 10-feet long wash basin, where they spend a few minutes washing their hands.
Considering that many schools around the country do not even get proper midday meals, Rani LP School’s record in hand hygiene is scripting a small yet significant success story. The initiative in the school started in 2012, as part of the DHaAL (Daily Hand Washing for an Ailment-Free Life) project of the Axom Sarba Siksha Abhiyan (SSA). The initiative was piloted by the UNICEF and the Centre for Environment Education (CEE).
This daily routine was taken up as a group activity to reinforce the habit of hygiene, leveraging the effects of social norms and peer pressure. Daily supervised group handwashing with soap before mid-day meals session is a life skill-based behaviour change approach, where all students as a group wash their hands with soap at least once a day, before meals.
Each year, across the world, one child dies every 30 seconds from diarrhoea. The simple act of washing hands with soap significantly cut the risk of diarrhoea from 30% to 50% and that of respiratory tract infection from 21% to 45%, thus proving to be the most cost-effective way to prevent diseases compared to any single vaccine.
While DHaAL is covering 421 schools in the first leg, in the second leg it aims to cover all 48000 schools in various phases. In the first phase, the state aims to cover 10,000 schools.
Currently, the group hand washing stations scheme is covered by the Swachh Bharat, Swachh Vidyalaya Campaign. And if applied throughout, the scheme has the potential of taking the health benefits of hand washing to 110 million children in schools with midday meals across the country.
The hand washing scheme is just one in a list of schemes that has the potential of changing the lives of children around the world, as per the UNICEF report “The State of the World’s Children Report – Reimagine the future: Innovation for every child”. The other schemes with similar potentials include the first rechargable hearing aid battery charger developed in Zimbabwe, mobile phone based youth programmes that reach out to Ebola-hit youth in Liberia, floating schools in Bangladesh, a navigating device invented by two teenagers in Colombia to help the hearing-impaired navigate, a urine-powered generator invented by Nigerian teenage girls, and building material made from rice waste made by a Chandigarh teen.
“In our ever-more connected world, local solutions can have a global impact – benefiting children in every country who still face inequity and injustice every day. For innovation to benefit every child, we have to be more innovative – rethinking the way we foster and fuel new ideas to solve our oldest problems,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. “The best solutions to our toughest challenges will come from young people, adolescents and children themselves.”
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