This World Toilet Day, Embassy Group shares insights on initiatives taken for sanitary and hygiene in school campuses in Karnataka
New Delhi: Every year on 19 November, the UN celebrates World Toilet Day to create awareness about the 4.2 billion people who are living without ‘safely managed sanitation’. The UN commemorates this day to take the stock of actions taken to tackle issues surrounding sanitation. The day highlights the importance of sanitation and hygiene in driving improvements in public health, gender equality, education, economic development and environmental protection. This year’s theme is ‘Valuing Toilets’.
Embassy Group believes a lack of hygienic toilets in government schools continues to threaten the education of students who are at risk of getting sick and subsequently missing school, adding to dropping attendance rates. To ensure the schools are disease-free and hygienic, Embassy Group distributed health kits, awareness posters and workbooks that provided tools to stay clean and healthy, as well as information on health risks, preventive measures, and hygiene maintenance.
Shaina Ganapthy, Head of Community Outreach, Embassy Group, said, “Access to sanitation, hygiene and clean drinking water has proven to be an enormous public health challenge for our country, with large swathes of our population still deprived of these basic needs. At Embassy, we strongly believe that every child should have access to clean and sanitary toilets. Through our flagship Government School health and hygiene program, we not only build and renovate toilets for our adopted schools but go on to maintain them thereafter with a dedicated team of professional cleaning staff from our facilities management arm – Technique Control Facilities Management (TCFM). The combination of proper sanitation facilities, clean water and awareness on behavioral practices will go a long way towards securing a healthy future for our children.”
Laying the basis for a generation of students with an improved lifelong resilience to disease, Embassy has been championing preventative health awareness in Government Schools since 2016. It was discovered over the years, with attendance levels in schools dropping and recurring conditions being noted each year, there was a general lack of understanding of preventative measures to combat common health programs. To tackle this, Embassy established a 7-step holistic health & hygiene program that provides the full gamut of support from preventative – including awareness, daily maintenance and clean drinking water to detective – comprehensive health screenings and medical interventions.