Lack of sanitation is one of the major problems facing children in the areas where we work. Most of them don’t have access to proper toilets and instead use empty spots around them. This lack of hygiene causes diseases and increases the burden on students and their families: students cannot come to school when they’re sick and parents have to spend money to buy medicines or get treatment at the hospital.

In order to improve the hygiene and the health in our target areas as well as to improve the school attendance, our nurses have explained our students’ families about the benefits of having the proper toilets, the importance of hygiene and encouraged them to build their own toilet or shared toilet with other families.

After almost a year of encouraging families to build toilets,  , most of them now have clean toilets to use. For those who could not afford to build the toilet individually, they pooled money together to build a communal toilet. Together, we’ve helped 8 toilets being built in the community.

One of the community members, Mr. Chan, explained “ Since  I got the information from ISF’s nurse on the benefits of using proper toilets and the bad impact of using empty spots , I committed to build a toilet for using in my family. As the cost of a proper toilet is between 55 US$ and 60 US$, it took me and my wife about 1 year 2 months to save enough money to build this toilet. Now, I am very happy when I see my family having a proper toilet to use like others”.