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Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Personal Hygiene And Sanitation Education (PHASE)

Every year more than two million people die of diarrhoea-related disease, mostly children in developing countries. These deaths can often be easily prevented through better hand-washing and sanitation.

PHASE is a school-based programme that helps to reduce diarrhoea-related disease by encouraging school children to wash their hands. We established PHASE in 1998 and since then we have invested over £4 million ($7 million) in the programme.

PHASE is run in partnership with AMREF, Save the Children and Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as Ministries of Health and Education in the countries where the programme operates.

The programme has had impressive results. In Bangladesh, for example, in partnership with Save the Children, we introduced PHASE to 127 schools in one of the country’s poorest areas, where it is helping to improve the lives of 20,000 young children and their families. In the three-year period of the programme’s funding:

• Schools with hand-washing facilities increased from 5 per cent to 97 per cent, leading to an increase in hand washing with soap by schoolchildren from 40 per cent to 75 per cent
• More latrines were made available in schools and a further 1,200 latrines constructed in children’s homes, resulting in a marked decrease in open defecation from 75 per cent of the population to 13 per cent
• With healthier children, school attendance rates increased from 53 per cent to 80 per cent over the period 2006 to July 2008

The success of PHASE in Nasirnagar (Bangladesh) led to the decision to expand the programme to include all 950 schools in the Brahmanbaria district. Save the Children is now working with health and education ministers to prepare them for the scale-up.

In 2008, we committed funding of £320,000 over three years to extend the programme into the slum areas of Mumbai in India with our partner Pratham. PHASE now operates in 13 countries and has reached over 500,000 children. Our aim is for the programme to reach over one million children by next year.

Supporting the Millennium Development Goals

In 2000 world leaders agreed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to meet the needs of the world’s poorest people. The MDGs include targets to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, and improve education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability.

We have introduced PHASE to two Millennium Villages in Malawi and Senegal. Millennium Villages are research projects in African communities designed to find practical ways to meet the MDGs

Global Hand-Washing Day

The first Global Hand-Washing Day was held during 2008. This was marked by a week of activities encouraging millions of children and adults around the world to wash their hands, with the aim of improving hygiene and health. PHASE partners arranged a range of activities to promote hand-washing which reached around 300,000 people.

Read more about PHASE and the Global Hand-Washing Day.