Child-to-Child Health Clubs

The child-to-child sanitation clubs use a peer education model in which older youth between the ages of 17 and 24 are trained as facilitators to spread messages about the importance of sanitation and hygiene to schoolchildren through various interactive strategies.

These peer educators encourage the formation of child-to-child sanitation clubs and, to date, organisers say clubs are operating in over 10 schools, involving about 12,000 students. These clubs are involved in advocating for healthy schools and good hygiene practices, and warning about the dangers of unhygienic environments through participatory methods like song, dance, theatre, and games. For example, children advocated for central refuse collection spots so that they no longer have to share their play spaces with garbage. They also raise awareness on how proper disposal of syringes and other medical material could help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

In addition to raising awareness around sanitation, the clubs works to provide students with safe after-school activities, as well as leadership skills, and an opportunity to engage in arts and creative media. The project also includes a child-to-child radio programme on Lebialem Community Radio that features child presenters and supports the objectives of the sanitation clubs.

According to organisers, the sanitation clubs are having an impact on adults in the community as well; this outcome emerges from efforts to establish linkages between parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and communities to ensure that hygiene education skills acquired in school can influence behaviour change at the community level. Children take home the messages of good sanitation and begin to practice these habits at home.

As a result, parents and adults have begun putting pressure on the local authorities to provide better sanitation and hygiene education and services in all schools. According to organisers, the success of the project has prompted inter-school discussions through radio drama competitions among students and teachers about the issues. This COL Cameroon Link initiative has inspired other municipalities to begin fundraising to start the project in their schools.

Health, Children, Youth, Sanitation

In 2010, a Cameroon Link study found that 75% of all primary schools in Lebialem had no toilets for boys or girls and no hand-washing facilities. Few schools promoted hygiene, and those that did focused on lectures by teachers with no student participation. The authorities of the ministries of basic education and public health state that an unexpected benefit of the project is that it is allowing girls to stay in school longer, and there has been no cholera outbreak in Lebialem as in other parts of Cameroon recently. Previously, many girls would leave school because of the lack of toilet facilities. For the girls, existing toilets left them without any privacy. According to organisers, now that child-friendly, separate sanitation facilities for girls and boys have been installed, girls are staying on to complete their basic primary education.

The COL Cameroon Link programme is executed closely with the Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of Education and Lebialem Community Radio as an Open Distance Learning process to see how the sanitation clubs can be replicated in other communities. As part of its national curriculum reform, the government schools of Cameroon have committed 15% of the school term to reflect on local issues. Cameroon Link is pressing for hygiene promotion activities to be part of that 15%.

In 2010, organisers introduced Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) pilot programme in Lebialem as an effort to accelerate the construction of new facilities with support from PTAs and schools themselves and adequate use of the facilities already available in the schools. This process involved training of 50 people from 10 health districts in May 2011.