Area 03 · Health & Dignity

The floor beneath every other outcome.

Health & Dignity

The problem

There is a version of development work that begins at the classroom door and treats everything before it as somebody else's department. Water. Toilets. Periods. Nutrition. A functioning primary health centre within reach.

But a girl who has no private, working toilet at school does not simply lose a few days a month. She loses attendance, then confidence, then continuity, and eventually the assumption — hers and everybody else's — that she was going to finish.

A child managing repeated waterborne illness is not a child with a concentration problem.

These are not welfare add-ons to education work. They are the conditions without which education work does not function.

What we do

Water, sanitation and hygiene
Working with schools and local bodies on whether facilities exist, whether they are usable, and whether they stay usable in month nine.
Menstrual health and dignity
Practical access, accurate information, and the far harder work of removing the shame that makes girls stay home.
Nutrition and the basics of health
Recognising and addressing the physical conditions that present in a classroom as inattention.
Connecting people to services that already exist
Most entitlements go unclaimed not because they are unavailable but because nobody has explained them. We work on the distance between a person and what they are already owed.
Health awareness that assumes intelligence
No lecturing, no moralising, no material written for an audience the community does not contain.

Rights, not charity.

Everything on this page is already guaranteed to every person in this country in one form or another — by law, by policy, or by scheme. Our work is very often not to provide something new, but to close the gap between an entitlement on paper and a life in which it is actually available.

We say this plainly because it changes the relationship. Nobody in our programmes is receiving a favour.

Who it is for

Children and adolescent girls in particular, and the schools, families and communities around them.

Layers this touches

IndividualFamilySchoolCommunitySociety
A large group of children gathered outside their homes in a settlement of corrugated-metal shelters.

Work with us on this.

If you run a school, a community organisation or a CSR programme and want to change the conditions rather than run an event, we would like to hear from you.

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