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Category: Public Health

Creating the Hygiene Culture: Impact of Dettol School Hygiene Program

COVID-19, the most severe public health crisis of our times, amplified our need for hygiene & sanitation. Governments, policy makers, health workers and civil society swiftly ramped up hygiene infrastructure and education in their drive for a disease-free world.

Following this trend Samhita & Collective Good Foundation partnered with Reckitt Benckiser to launched the Dettol School Hygiene Education Programme in the State of Andhra Pradesh in 2015 and extended the programme to Telangana by 2016 and to Tamil Nadu by 2018.

The programme builds knowledge, attitudes, practice and behaviour around hygiene in children by engaging children as collaborators, letting them drive the change. It builds their leadership and critical-thinking skills and enables them to solve hygiene problems in creative, sustainable ways, like solving the problem of access by setting up soap banks, ensuring hygiene through Child Parliaments and more.

In a boost to the programme, the curriculum was translated into several local languages, easing the path to adoption and engagement across South India. In another first, Collective Good Foundation introduced digital learning through government education portals. Andhra Pradesh was the first state to upload digital video episodes on their DISHA portals. These videos are accessible to all schools and teachers at the touch of a button and now reach 2.5 million students across 42,000 schools.

Click below to read the full report on how the Dettol School Hygiene Education Programme is developing a culture of hygiene in India’s children.

Why the health of sanitation workers needs to be our society

“In a world without sanitation workers, business and daily life would come to a halt”.

It may seem too extreme to state but is nevertheless true. Without sanitation workers, the functioning of our ecosystem will halt as supply chains of products and services are adversely affected.

Samhita believes that it is essential to ensure preventive health care for our sanitation workers to not only ensure the smooth functioning of our society but also enable them to live a life of dignity. Our WASH platform and, more recently, our IPA platform aims to put money where our mouth is.

To know more about our approach, read this article written by Priya Naik, Ragini Menon and Tushar Carhavlo for CNBC-TV18.

Click here to read the article

Our Private Healthcare System

India has a mixed healthcare system, with majority of healthcare services being provided by the private sector. This accentuates the importance of private health care enterprises to partake in providing smaller and district level health providers with the support to continue functioning during economic upheaval.

Public health and economic experts stressed the importance of organising and fortifying the private healthcare system

Are healthcare facilities accessible to India

“India no longer has the luxury of continuing to wait and watch as millions of its tribal peoples suffer and die from preventable causes.”

There is a much higher incidence of maternal and under-five mortality, stuntedness, tuberculosis, and cardiovascular diseases among India’s 104 million tribals compared with the larger population.

Piramal Swasthya and The Bridgespan Group map out the reasons for the lack of reduction of health challenges in tribal areas based on their field studies.

They outline factors such as barriers in access to healthcare and information, insufficient number of public health facilities, and lack of data.

They stress that for scalable and population-wide impact to be achieved, especially to meet India’s national aspirations of Sustainable Development goals of health and well being- a focused and collaborative approach between all stakeholders of society is the only way forward.

Read the full article

The key to COVID-19 prevention in slums

Slums across India have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis. 42% of Mumbai’s population lives in slums and therefore they require carefully planned measures to ensure that preventative and primary care remain accessible.

The Bridgespan Group and WHO emphasise that community participation is the key to implement any COVID-19 preventive interventions in the slums.

This is as a model of care, designed while incorporating community participation is more likely to be accepted and effective in the long-term. To elaborate on the practicality of their recommendation, they describe activities where communities have been engaged and relay how this principle helped the programs in Mumbai slums.

Click here to read the article

WASH Platform | Wash Grand Challenge (2019)

The WASH Platform builds synergistic collaboration between multiple stakeholders from the Private Sector, Development Sector and the Government, to identify, implement and replicate high impact projects across the sanitation value chain, starting from the state of Maharashtra.

The platform is a joint initiative between Samhita Social Ventures and India Sanitation Coalition in partnership with The Government of Maharashtra, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with UNICEF and CEPT University as knowledge partners.

VIACOM18 | How to impact through the media lens

In a time where majority stakeholders were concentrating on building infrastructure to achieve the mission of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Viacom18 utilized the weapon they knew best – storytelling to create lasting impact in a society that has long been captured by the screen.

The Viacom18 story

With the launch of Swachh Bharat Mission, availability and access to toilets had improved tremendously. But social and behavioural change communication were far from implementation questioning the long-term adoption of infrastructure usage. Lack of sanitation has many rippling effects. 

The economic deprivation increases manifold when healthcare expenses and the cost of lost potential due to sickness arising from inadequate sanitation is added.

With the belief that sustained change in behaviour is at the helm of creating long term impact, Viacom18 worked with Samhita to design an intervention that aimed to address the issue of Open Defecation in Mumbai

Kimberly Clark | Making lives better through purpose driven brands

The global effort to achieve sanitation and water for all by 2030 is extending beyond the household to include institutional settings such as separate washrooms in schools and workspaces. 

About 94% of women are employed in the informal sectors, according to the National Women