Developing countries and sanitation: greatest killer

in #blog6 years ago

I will be sharing bits of a draft I have been working on. I was working on a research's literature review and I saw something that triggered me to just share bits of it and how it plays out in our schools. I believe if we want to conquer the issue of sanitation, our schools has to be starting point.

waste.jpg
|| What you are seeing here is not a Photoshop art or a random pic from the internet. It is a real pic of stew being prepared for public.

The World Health Organization (WHO) (2000)source, refers to sanitation as the provision of facilities and services for the safe disposal of human urine and feces; and inadequate provision of these facilities is a major cause of diseases worldwide. It abundantly clear now that improving sanitation is known to have a significant impact on health both in households and across communities (WHO 2000). The word sanitation also refers to the maintenance of hygiene conditions, through services such as garbage collection and waste water disposal.

A report from UNESCO in 2010 revealed that one in five children between the ages of 10 and 15 are out of school. There have been lots of opinions as to what is causing this high rates of school drop outs particularly with some pointing to the lack of sanitation facilities in the schools.

School Sanitation and Hygiene Education (SSHE) is the combination of hardware and software components that are necessary to produce a healthy school environment to develop or support safe hygiene behavior (UNICEF, IRC (1988), Coppens (2005)). These organizations are of the view that hardware components include supply of drinking water and facilities for hand washing and safe disposal of excreta and solid waste in and around the school compound. The software components are the activities that promote conditions at schools and practices of school staff and children that help to prevent water and sanitation related diseases and parasites.

However, UNICEF in 2006 reported that sanitation has not been taken as a priority and as a result some students have often missed out important academic activities due to sicknesses from sanitation related causes. Many schools especially in the rural communities have failed to take sanitation seriously and does not provide sanitary facilities in their school, hand washing, access to safe water and other sanitation related issues are kept at low priority level.

Snel (2004) and Water Aid Uganda (2013) indicate that health influences learning and education influences health. This is because poor sanitation causes diarrhoea, which kills 1.5 million children each year. However, smart investments in sanitation can reduce disease, increase family incomes, keep girls and boys in school, help preserve the environment, and enhance human dignity. Increasing evidence also shows that school sanitation and hygiene education programmes offer high cost benefit (DANIDA, 2007).

One of the most dangerous disease of the tropical regions is malaria and malaria is mostly sanitation related as the mosquitoes are bred in stagnant waters and bushy environments.

Meanwhile no the view of Abbey, Ameyibor, Alhassan, Essiah, Fometu and Wiredu (2001) about 200 million people get malaria in tropical countries every year and about 2 million die of it

Most of these are children of school going age. It is important as from the literature that health and learning are so much related that one cannot learn without health. Understanding the link between sanitation and health is therefore of much relevance to educational policy makers, the stakeholders and the pupils.

Ehmkannde (5).png
This is just a part of my draft for the literature review of my current research project, sanitation is a big issue. We need to collaborate and come out with innovation to fight the current sanitation issues in our country.

Sort:  

Hello! I find your post valuable for the wafrica community! Thanks for the great post! @wafrica is now following you! ALWAYs follow @wafrica and use the wafrica tag!

it will take a true community and government effort to combat the widespread rubbish problem.

It is not an impossible task we just must figure out a way to incentivize the people to be active in environmental remediation.

I would be interested to read your scholarly work after you have completed the research.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 71539.00
ETH 3603.23
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.75