The collective efforts of the people turn their village healthy

Paschim Manoharpur is a remote and poor village located at Manoharpur union of Monirampur upazila under Jessore district of Bangladesh. The village is also a house of more than 115 families comprising 444 people, of whose 244 male and 200 female. The livelihoods of the villagers predominantly revolve around daily wages as some are day-labors and others are van pullers. But a lion's share of their wages used to go off in health treatment because of getting sick often around the year. Losing a chunk of their precious earnings only in medical treatment, the villagers had no idea of causing illness & taking away and affecting their lives & livelihoods. In fact, the people of Paschim Manoharpur were unaware of their hanging toilets, contaminated Tube-well water and other unhygienic habits behind their poor health.

In 2017, SKS Foundation started working with the villagers under a project “MAX NutriWash” to identify their problems, understand the causes of their health problems and find the ways & means to solve these problems. The big challenge was all villagers must be agreed and understood that not only individual health but also collective health of the community is equally important to be healthy. The SKS Max Nutri-WASH Project along with the villagers worked hard to turn the villagers understood that not any individual but collective health of the community is equally important to be healthy. The entire village collectively started working for solving their health problems by their action & efforts. A survey was conducted, a social map was drawn, and the well-being of the marginalized people was analyzed. Then, for community mobilization, a 15-member Community Support Group (CSG) was given full support with capacity-building training in managing, monitoring and utilizing community health. This CSG united all villagers using Participatory Graduation Monitoring (PGM) at their village and found out their gaps. For the holistic development of the village, it combined food & nutrition security with WASH.

Initially, for demonstration, SKS installed 2 Community-based Deep Tube-wells and 1 Woman Bathing Chamber with Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) facilities and donated 20 off-pit sanitary latrines to ultra-poor families of the village. Besides, it promoted Local Entrepreneur (LE), Health Promotion Agents (HPA), mentors & sweepers for the availability and demand of healthy products & services.SKS also conducted advocacy with UP, DPHE and other stakeholders through different meeting and workshop and Union Parishad distributed 20 latrines to the marginalized people in the community and DPHE installed 5 tube-well at community level.

Finally, the day came on 17 November 2020 as a reward for their collective work, the village was officially declared as a Healthy Village as the village has met 18 indicators of a healthy village. The health scenario of the village has been dramatically changed. Now, 100% of the villagers are having and using the sanitary latrine, napkin, handwashing devices, basin beside latrine, safe drinking water,nutrition garden, maintaining birth registration, PNC & ANC check-up, breastfeeding, GMP & 360-degree hygiene and providing supplementary food. Now 88% family has a dining and kitchen basin,and more than 60% family has a Woman Bathing Chamber (WBC).

Mashiur Rahaman, the Chairman of the Manoharpur union, said while announcing Paschim Manoharpur as a Healthy Village “I am very proud to be a part of this Healthy Village at my union and see the change of the people’s behaviors toward health and WASH. This has been possible because of collective and individual efforts towards health and WASH.”