Healthy Fingers Save Lives

Location: Ghana (Accra)

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in December 2019, there has been a lot of information circulating around the community from different sources. Some of them are an exaggerated version of the truth and some are far from the truth. On the top of that, even the messages that are organized and released by the government and other responsible bodies are not child friendly. Most of the information was not designed to the level of understanding of children.

During this covid 19 outbreak, hand hygiene is the number one, simple, cheep, and irreplaceable protective measure that is currently available. Unfortunately, this hand hygiene process is not that cheap for most vulnerable populations like working children and youth, street connected children, migrant children and children and youth in humanitarian crises in Ghana, and for that matter the whole world. These populations cannot afford to buy soaps and hand sanitizers to keep their hands clean from the spreading virus. This would bring additional negative impacts to their already vulnerable living conditions.

In our previous projects we had the opportunity to work directly with these groups of children, which helped us to understand their needs, their living conditions and solutions that can best suit their environments to solve the problems in their daily lives. We had the chance to do one on one interviews with some of these children about the covid-19 outbreak and how it affected their lives, and we gained an insight on some of their burning issues and what support they really need in regards to the fight against this pandemic.

As a solution to this challenge, our proposed project has two major activities with the overall goal of protecting these vulnerable groups of children from the deadly covid-19 infection.

1. Designing child friendly messages regarding covid-19 from reliable sources like the World Health Organization and the Ghana Ministry of Health. This information will be made available in easy and child friendly words for dissemination in the community using accessible sources like local community radios, and printed Medias like banners and small information leaflets.

2. Provision of a hand-washing basin to improve the behavior of washing hands with soap among these target populations. The hand washing basins we propose are Teckytap. Teckytap is a locally made, durable and easy to use hand-washing basin with a pedal pump to dispense water. It has the advantage of preventing the hands from re-contamination during manipulation of taps after washing our hands.

Welfare of Children and Youth Association (Child led NGO with a vision is to see children born to live and grow in a good condition and enjoy their rights to the fullest) in partnership with Community Alliance Foundation (Child Focus Social Enterprise that seeks to develop appropriate technology in solving social challenges especially in the WASH sector) would implement this project.

Support

The required budget for the indicated project is 10,000 USD. Our organization is a child led Non Governmental Organization. All of our members are child and youth volunteers from their respective communities.

So far we have been able to do community resource mobilization and we were able to get some amount which helped us to head start on the designing of the child friendly messages about COVID-19. What we need now is the rest of the budget to complete all the activities of our project.

Other needs: Space for online meetings, More visibility to showcase our efforts to potential partners.

See more:

https://www.facebook.com/123469208314502/posts/486797008648385/?app=fbl

www.cafgh.org

For more information contact covid19@unmgcy.org