Country Background
Papua New Guinea ranks among the bottom 10 nations worldwide for access to clean, safe water and sanitation. Defecation is normally in wooded areas, outdoors in very basic and unhygienic concrete slab pit latrines. Discussion of defecation is sensitive and in some cases taboo in PNG. Most schools have been constructed without appropriate water and sanitation services. Many students cannot attend school due to diarrhoea and students are sent home when the limited school water supplies run out.
Project activities and objectives:
The project will ensure all school children have adequate access to latrines, as well as drinking and hand washing water.
To establish quality hygiene educational programmes to teach students the importance of clean water, personal hygiene, and responsible behaviour in the use and preservation of community water and sanitation facilities
- Teach students using hand-outs showing simple toilets and illustrated health messages.
- Distribute “do’s and don’ts poster”
- Provide health education messages to teachers, via one day school based workshops.
- Distribute ‘Worms and Germs’ educational board games to teachers via teachers in service day and provide training in their use
- Conduct HIV/AIDS awareness with the school community
- Provide practical instruction on how to use the toilet to students during toilet construction and again during the opening ceremony
- Conduct responsibilities workshop
To provide sufficient safe water supplies for 2 litres of drinking water and 3 litres of hand washing water per student per day.
- Construction of two 4,500L ferro-cement rainwater tanks(or installation of one 9000L Tuffa tank) to meet the water demand above
- Construction of a pipe to tap stands for hand washing outside the ATloo block for each school (including soap dish)
- Operation and management training
- Provision of a starter bar of soap for each hand washing point
Provision of adequate and sustainable sanitation facilities
- Construction of ATloos to provide adequate ATloos for all students according to the ratio developed in the national guidelines.
- Opening with whole school community and representatives of the Departments of Health and Education and distribution of instructional poster for the inside of each ATloo and varnish to the inside
Part of a larger project
This Footprints Funded school is one small part of a larger project in the Daulu District in Eastern Highlands Province that aims to improve the health status of approximately 3,700 students across 10 community and primary schools .
