Health and Hygiene Workshops

Working with benefiting families to achieve access to safe water or sanitation is a key milestone worthy of celebration for any community. However, the work continues though for Suma Jayma. Promoting improved hygiene and health as part of each community water development project is a great opportunity.

With improved access to water, such simple habits as washing hands with soap following restroom use and prior to preparing and eating meals makes a tremendous difference in reducing water-borne illnesses.

One study demonstrates that "washing hands with soap can reduce the risk of diarrhoeal diseases by 42–47%.(1)"

The importance of encouraging simple hand washing efforts, now that clean water is available to family members, cannot be overstated. "Child mortality figures released by UNICEF show that some 2,000 children under five years of age die each day from diarrhoeal diseases. A vast majority of them contract these diseases due to a lack of safe water, sanitation and basic hygiene." The same UN News article notes “You don’t need to invent some Nobel Prize winning formula to save millions of children. The solution already exists: soap and water.”(2)

Suma Jayma promotes an integral development approach, and incorporating health and hygiene workshops into their community water and sanitation projects is an opportunity to maximize benefit for community members' well-being.

(1) Effect of washing hands with soap on diarrhoea risk in the community: a systematic review. The Lancet. May 2003

(2) Simple handwashing crucial to halting diarrhoeal and water-borne diseases, UN stresses. UN News 15 Oct 2012