Some SSHE initiatives

In most industrialised countries it is almost impossible to imagine a school system or pre-school which is not concerned with the health and hygiene of children. Personal hygiene and hygiene education are usually strongly emphasised. The roots of this are to be found, for example, in the early 19th century Scandinavian continuing education movement and in the early curricula of North American schools. Education in both Europe and North America was initially based on personal hygiene and hygiene education and only later was there a focus on the facilities themselves.

In the same way the early programmes developed in the post-colonial periods in many African, Asian and South American nations emphasized learning about personal hygiene. In many instances, when children learned (and sometimes still learn) about the importance of hand washing and using latrines or toilets these facilities were not available in the school.

Partly because of this gap between what was being taught and what facilities were available, many of the 1980s water and sanitation programmes for schools focused on construction and meeting construction targets. In consequence many construction-oriented programmes did not sufficiently emphasize teacher training, the organizational needs of the school or the hygiene education needs of the children - all crucial to effective use and maintenance of the water and sanitation facilities.

Two further developments over the last 50 years have made it difficult to effectively continue education related to sanitation and hygiene in many school programmes. First, school systems in many countries have retained a largely academic orientation, despite many efforts at reform. These systems are led, to a lesser or greater extent, by examination syllabi that do not include life skills such as hygiene or health education. As a result, these subjects can be under-emphasized or omitted. Secondly, the growth of mass education has brought many millions of children into schools who would never have been able to attend in earlier generations. The influx has been so great as to overwhelm the ability of education systems to provide sufficient facilities for hygiene and water.

Now however this trend is slowly changing. Many educational systems and schools are beginning to adopt strategies that can support strong health and hygiene education. These strategies include the development of the school as resource base, peer learning and peer teaching, programmes that stimulate child-to-child education, child-to-family learning and school-to-community transfer. A good school sanitation and hygiene programme can benefit from these strategies and can support them.