afe
drinking water and sanitation are children’s issues inexorably linked to
girls’ education. UNICEF states that safe water and adequate sanitation
are as important to quality education as pencils, books and teachers.
Far too many schools in India are woefully lacking hygienic conditions
with broken, dirty and unsafe water supplies and toilets or latrines not
adapted to children, especially girls. Some have no water or sanitation
facilities at all. Too often schools are hazardous to children’s health!
Apart from children being prone
to water-borne diseases, their attendance in schools is also affected.
Due to the repeated episodes of water-borne diseases related illnesses,
students drop out of school, further affecting their education and
economic prospects.
Safe drinking water and
adequate sanitation are especially crucial for girls to take their
rightful place in the classroom and avoid absenteeism. Without these
basic necessities, girls will continue to remain absent. While affecting
all school-aged children, inadequate sanitation facilities hit the girls
hardest, pushing many out of the classroom for lack of privacy and
dignity, leading to reduced earning power and poverty for most of them
in the long run.
Given the substantially
positive impact of safe drinking water on the establishment of good
health, hygiene, sanitation practices and education during formative
stage of a child’s life, addressing the widespread problem of microbial
contamination in drinking water and providing sanitation facilities as a
priority can have far-reaching effects in reducing water-borne diseases,
decrease in drop-outs from schools especially of girls, reducing child
morbidity and mortality.
Our Initiatives
Keeping the above issue in
mind, TARA (Technology and Advancement for Rural Action), the social
enterprise wing of the Development Alternatives (DA) Group and
CLEAN-India programme (Community Led Environment Action Network), a
youth centre-centric and community led environment assessment,
awareness, action and advocacy programme, have developed a WATSAN (water
and sanitation) programme to reach out to schools and communities for
access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities.
TARA has received a Corporate
Social Responsibility grant from Ford Motors and Jochnick Foundation for
addressing safe drinking water and sanitation needs of schools and
communities in more than 100 schools across India.
Through these projects, more
than 100,000 children in schools will be provided with access to safe
drinking water through installation of water filters such as the Jal-TARA
bio-sand filter and other such sustainable water purification systems.
Around 30,000 girl students will also benefit with safe sanitation
practices as a result of installation of toilets.
School children and community
members are being and will continue to be engaged in awareness
generation on the importance of safe drinking water and hygiene through
formation of eco-committees. These projects build on the experience of
the nation-wide Community Led Environment Action Network (CLEAN)
programme where student initiated community assessment, awareness,
advocacy and action are carried out.
The Beneficiaries
Primary Target Group: Primary
beneficiaries are the school children. More than 100,000 school children
will gain access to safe drinking water. The girl students in the
schools (approximately 30,000) will also be able to use safe and
hygienic toilets. Over 1000 CLEAN-India student ambassadors are being
developed to reach out to communities for safe drinking water,
sanitation and hygiene practices
Secondary Target Group:
Secondary beneficiaries are the local communities near the schools.
Through student-led awareness campaigns, these communities will learn
easy and cost-effective ways to conserve and purify water as well as
understand the benefits of safe water sanitation and hygiene.
The initiatives over the next
couple of years are intended to result in far-reaching outcomes as
listed below: