Millions of people across the globe celebrated the 4th annual Global Handwashing Day on 15 October 2011, emphasising the importance of handwashing with soap as an effective, simple, and affordable way to prevent disease.
Published on: 28/10/2011
Millions of people across the globe celebrated the 4th annual Global Handwashing Day on 15 October 2011, emphasising the importance of handwashing with soap as an effective, simple, and affordable way to prevent disease.
Over 1 million children took part in Pakistan, where UNICEF supported the launch of a new animated children's character, 'Sabu', to help teach children the importance of handwashing with soap.
In Afghanistan, 1.7 million children from 1,700 schools washed hands; in Eritrea, 326,809 children in 1,272 schools did the same. In Peru, the government declared a national handwashing week as of 10 October, and events involved 3.5 million students in 20,000 schools. In India, eight million children in Rajasthan and all 154,000 schools in Uttar Pradesh participated in handwashing events.
In Haiti, UNICEF and its partners undertook a two-week handwashing campaign, which included the distribution of 300,000 bars of soap, reaching 1,500 schools, 10 hospitals and more than 160 county health centres.
In two districts in Uganda, around 4,000 local people received an SMS message on the importance of washing hands. This was an initiative of Text to Change in partnership with USAID through STRIDES for Family Health and Unilever Uganda.
These and other activities promise to surpass celebrations in 2010, which saw 200 million people and 700,000 schools in over 70 countries honouring the day.
Global Handwashing Day was created by the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing in 2008.
For a list of recent research and other resources on handwashing see WASHplus Weekly, no. 7, 07 Oct 2011
Related web site: Global Handwashing Day
Source: Sanitation Updates, 24 Oct 2011
