Today’s children are changing tomorrow
should be, with lower learning capacity. Those who then make it to school may drop out if their school does not have toilets. This is especially the case for adolescent girls, many of whom will leave school when they start menstruating.
These hurdles must be addressed today because these children will be the artists, scientists, lawyers, farmers and dreamers of tomorrow.
They have a right to grow up and fulfil their potential. The solution to poor sanitation is not a new one. It is not simply enough to build a toilet, we must encourage people to use and maintain them. We must focus on convincing adults and children to change a lifetime of habits in order to promote healthier practices being passed down for generations to come.
The Swachh Bharat Mission launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2, 2014, is the world’s largest behaviour change initiative of its kind. It truly recognises that poor sanitation is a generational problem, with parents teaching their long-existing behaviours to children. It has gone one step further by directly engaging and harnessing the potential of children and young people to advocate behaviour change.
Young people know that they deserve better. Like the thousands who wrote respectful yet firm letters to their parents in Chhattisgarh, they have the ability to see problems where adults see the status quo, the vision to see solutions where adults see problems, and the energy to get those solutions working, when adults give up.
Unicef is proud to support the Government of India in mobilizing children by providing platforms and popularising key sanitation messages and tools in schools. Unicef has helped develop methodologies that successfully ‘trigger’ students and teachers into realising the importance of having access to and using safe sanitation facilities, not just in schools, but also within the homes and communities they return to at the end of each day. As the Swachh Bharat Mission continues to unfold, I look forward to hearing more stories from children like those in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Jharkhand who are leading the fight against poor sanitation, one toilet and one household at a time. With such excellent young leaders, I am confident that the future they are creating will be a healthier and more productive one.
It is our obligation as individuals, communities and governments, to support them and help build a tomorrow in which the sanitation crisis is just a scary story of the past.