Child Friendly Schools

Child Friendly Schools: HIV+ prevention, Health and Hygiene Education for in school children

This project will seek to build on the achievements made during the implementation of the previous project Fighting the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world
which aimed at making schools child friendly while building their capacity in positive health seeking behaviours. In the previous project (June 2012-June 2013) the sahee foundation supported Compassionate Swaziland in building the capacity of adolescent boys and girls in HIV prevention, sexual and reproductive health. These included reducing school related gender based violence, stigma and discrimination against children living with HIV and building children’s capacities in treatment literacy.
Despite the positive impacts witnessed during the last project, stigma and discrimination among adolescent boys and girls school related gender based violence remain deeply rooted. This has been attributed partly to poor sanitation facilities and in particular school toilets which do not guarantee girls’ privacy due to poor design and lack of maintenance. Schools in remote rural communities do not provide child friendly sanitation facilities that guarantee privacy and health security to pupils. Particularly in poor rural communities in Swaziland girls face severe and detrimental problems of personal safety, hygiene, privacy and health in relation to the use of latrines at school. In some schools girls are forced to share facilities with boys. Such problems are compounded by lack of water for hygiene and sanitation purposes which breeds disease due to the lack of latrines, inadequate water supplies, and water storage in containers easily contaminated by hand.
Hence, issues of privacy and personal hygiene related to adolescent girls have been prioritised for this project.
The main objectives of the project are:
1. To provide HIV prevention information to adolescent pupils
2. To provide treatment, care and support to HIV+ adolescents on ARV (antiretroviral drug).
3. To promote positive health and hygiene behaviours among school children.
4. To improve school level hygiene and sanitation in rural primary and secondary schools in Swaziland.

Project site

Lubombo and Shiselweni region (Map)

Beneficiaries

50 women, 50 men, 200 children below 16 years, as well as their families benefit from the project.

Project costs and assistance by sahee

The entire project costs are CHF 122’000.–, whereas sahee takes over CHF 96’000.–.

96’000.- CHF for three years, regular contact with the project leader and yearly visits for monitoring the project on-site.

Duration of assistance

1st of January 2014 to 31st of December 2016

Local counterpart

Compassionate Swaziland