An FMCG major’s Banega Swachh India hygiene curriculum celebrates outreach to 4.52 million school children across eight states at Chak-a-Chak fair
Reckitt Benckiser, consumer health and hygiene company, collaborated with the Global Citizen India, to celebrate the success of the three-year completion of its Dettol School Hygiene Education curriculum through a hi-impact, one-of-its-kind event named as Chaka Chak Mela, in New Delhi. The event was carefully crafted to educate children in an edutainment environment. RB is delivering the curriculum in partnership with the Aga Khan Foundation, Samhita, Collective Good Foundation, Learning Links Foundation ADRA and Pehel across urban and rural schools in the states of Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh.
Congratulating the partners on the historic moment, Gaurav Jain, senior vice president, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia (AMESA), RB Health India, said, “Children are the change-agents of the society and reaching out early to them means ensuring that we inspire these young minds to inculcate the learning into a habit. We are proud to see the positive impact on the handwashing habits of children exposed to the curriculum. We have focussed on a five-step experiential learning method, which has allowed us to touch upon five crucial everyday aspects of hygiene. I am sure that once the students understand these basic hygiene measures, they would turn into influencers for others and nation-builders of tomorrow.”
The curriculum is designed to suit grade-appropriate learning of students — level one is for grade one and two, level two is for grade three and four and level three is for grade five and above. The content is structured into five focus themes that addresses personal hygiene, hygiene at home, in schools, during illness and in neighbourhood. In total, the curriculum covers 15 topics across the five themes.
“We are proud of our strong partnership with RB that has enabled the Aga Khan foundation and its partners to implement a vibrant and effective programme across 1,000 schools in some of the most vulnerable geographies. We are working to collectively address the issue of sanitation and hygiene by inculcating regular handwashing practices as well as strengthening school capacity to prioritise Wash-in-Schools. The simple child friendly tools, messages and campaigns have been widely appreciated by district officials across all our project locations, facilitating wider outreach and scaling up of the initiative to over 3,000 schools in 2019.”
The curriculum also focusses on sensitising children about six critical occasions for handwashing, which include washing hands after defecation and the use of toilets; before eating; before preparing and serving food; before feeding infants/children and after coughing or sneezing.
The event was designed around the theme of a mela. It focussed on seeding the information that sanitation and hygiene are concepts that can be easily taught. Each of these activities were carefully selected to organise a familiar yet informative and engaging experience. It witnessed activities such as street play, puppetry, hip-hop and rap.
The event also saw a parallel activity involving training of teachers, who are most influential stakeholders, if we need to win against diseases that proliferate because of bad hygiene practices. The experiential activity delivered exercise on developing soft skills, becoming leaders and role models for students, with a focus on imparting knowledge on hand-hygiene.
The objective of the initiative is to use five step experiential learning methods to increase knowledge and inculcate good habits of hygiene-related behaviours among kids from an early age. These various sessions also resulted in children influencing their families, thereby, creating a multiplier effect. Under the programme, 690 soap banks were installed that delivered direct benefits to approximately 38,000 children.