PESHAWAR, Sept 13: Senior educationists have called for provision of clean drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities in schools so that students could be saved from a host of ailments.
“The provision of appropriate water and sanitation facilities in educational institutions forms an essential component of the education system because the children without these facilities are vulnerable to diseases,” said Mohammad Farid Qureshi, Special Secretary, NWFP Schools and Literacy Department, on Thursday.
In order to promote safe practices in schools, hygiene education would be made a part of the training for schoolteachers and school managers, he said.
He was addressing the participants of a three-day training course entitled “School Sanitation and Hygiene Education”, organised here by the Provincial Institute of Teacher Education (Pite) with the financial and technical assistance of the Unicef-supported School Sanitation and Hygiene Education (SSHE) Centre.
Eid Badshah, director of the Pite, said his organisation, in collaboration with the Unicef, had established Pakistan’s first School Sanitation and Hygiene Education (SSHE) Centre in May this year. So far, over 150 education managers, administrators and supervisory staff of schools and literacy department had been imparted training on school sanitation and hygiene education under the programme.
He stated that given the importance of provision of water and sanitation facilities and promotion of appropriate hygiene practices for improving health and school enrolment, learning and retention, SSHE centre had chalked out a comprehensive training plan for the education managers.
In this regard, he said, training manuals were being developed. He said that an information website on SSHE had also been launched. The training covered various topics relating to SSHE including basic concepts, water and sanitation-related diseases, life skills-based hygiene education, role of parent teacher’s councils in SSHE promotion, behaviour change, selection of appropriate health and hygiene contents and integration of SSHE in teaching curricula.
The training course was attended by 25 delegates from the regional teacher training institutes and institutes of education and research from across the province.
He said that unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation and hygiene every year claim lives of more than 1.5 million children under five years of age globally, mainly from diarrhoea. Provision of adequate water and sanitation in schools had, therefore, been termed the key to meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including those relating to universal primary education and child mortality, he added.
Consequently, he said that Unicef was promoting an additional target alongside those of the MDGs, which is aiming to ensure that all schools have adequate child friendly water and sanitation facilities, along with hygiene-education programmes.
The Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 had emphasized sanitation in schools as a priority action, he said. He said that the 13th Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in 2005 had reiterated this position and also had emphasized the need for hygiene education in schools.