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Our Bureau

Kolkata Dec. 14

AS part of its clutch of education initiatives in India, Unicef has implemented a project in Rajasthan, which aims at creating an environment in schools that would sustain school attendance, particularly of girls, while spreading the message of health and sanitation.

This particular initiative was launched in January 2000 jointly with the Rajasthan Council of Primary Education. It unfolds in Alwar district of Rajasthan, which is characterised by poor environmental conditions resulting in a large number of children dying of diarrhoea and parasitic diseases.

The schools have little provision for either safe drinking water or sanitary toilets and the children had no inkling of the hygienic practices needed to prevent illness. This situation affected school enrolment and retention, particularly of girls, in primary schools.

The Unicef project's objective was to educate children, who in turn would educate their families and community on the importance of sanitation, with school teachers also being involved in the entire exercise to bring behavioural changes in hygiene as part of the curriculum.

The implementation of the package was through capacity building of teachers, headmasters and resource centre facilitators to sensitise them to the issue and on the objectives of the project. About 1,500 children were also trained to act as sanitation scouts who would create community awareness towards diseases, personal hygiene and maintenance of water hand pumps.

The UN body saw this project as an exclusive example of convergence, where it provided project personnel logistical support and some other resources to provide water and sanitation facilities in schools.

While in the first stage, the programme was implemented in five blocks covering 558 schools, in the subsequent stage it was extended to another five blocks covering 680 schools.

The project is seen as an instance of involving children as agents of change where they have successfully carried out a message and brought about attitudinal changes.

Unlike many other intervention projects where infrastructure activities in school education are treated in isolation, this project has been able to link school facilities to the curriculum in terms of its use and maintenance, thereby ensuring sustainablility of impact, the Unicef report said. The Unicef interventions between 1998 and 2002 listed in this report are those that took place in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.

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