Working in primary schools with teachers and children is an efficient way towards improving hygiene and sanitation practices, and ultimately health in communities. By replicating good hygiene and sanitation practices at home and transmitting the knowledge to parents and siblings, children become change agents.
In 2003, Caritas Switzerland developed an approach called "The Children Hygiene and Sanitation Training – CHAST". CHAST is a comprehensive and participative training content on good hygiene and sanitation practices in primary schools. The first version was developed in 2003 and was copyrighted in 2014 by Caritas Switzerland.
Within the last decade, CHAST has been implemented in 450 schools of Caritas Switzerland and benefitted a total of 167’000 children. In Caritas Switzerland’s projects as part of the Swiss Water and Sanitation Consortium and beyond, the CHAST Kit was often used to cover the WASH topics of Blue Schools.
Since its first edition, Caritas Switzerland has collected feedback and learnings on the relevance and effectiveness of CHAST from project teams and teachers in different countries. In the last five years, several research studies and an impact evaluation were carried out to assess the impact of CHAST and come up with recommendations on how to further improve the methodology. Based on these studies, Caritas Switzerland elaborated a new edition of the CHAST Kit, in the form of three different documents that can be downloaded as a zip file from the Caritas Homepage (scroll down to see 'Toolbox "Children's Hygiene and Sanitation Training (CHAST"'):
- CHAST – Methodology Outline. For any organisation, donors or education authorities interested in understanding, what CHAST is about, what it aims to do and how it works.
- CHAST – Facilitator’s Guide: A step-by-step facilitation handbook. For facilitators, with detailed guidance on how to facilitate the different steps and activities.
- CHAST – Flipchart: Visualization material for facilitators to use with children.
CHAST Objectives
CHAST promotes good hygiene and sanitation practices in schools and at home by raising children’s awareness on transmission routes of waterborne and hygiene-related diseases and how to block them. More specifically, CHAST focuses on practices that help blocking the transmission routes of germs and improve children’s health, such as:
- Drinking safe water
- Using well-maintained latrines
- Keeping good personal hygiene such as hand washing, face washing, tooth brushing and keeping clothes clean, covering food, washing utensils
- Keeping the environment clean and healthy
- Managing menstruation hygienically and with dignity (only for upper primary schools)
CHAST Key Principles
CHAST is a step-by-step methodology that encourages the ‘learning by doing’ as the best way for children to understand and then put the learnings into practice:
“Tell me, and I forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.”
CHAST is meant to be participative and fun – it prompts the children to discuss among themselves, practice together and learn from each other, this way promoting a child-to-child approach.
CHAST Components & Learning Techniques
CHAST provides different materials and learning techniques for lower primary school children and for upper primary school children. CHAST also encourages the establishment of a children’s club, often called School Health Club (SHC), and provides inspiration for the club’s activities.
CHAST offers a variety of educational games and practical exercises to ensure that each child can learn based on its learning style preferences and age. Puppet Dolly In lower primary school, a puppet is used to encourage young or shy children to take part in the discussions and games. In addition, three characters have been created and used in all drawings used for CHAST. These characters have been carefully designed so that children can identify with them and with their behaviour.
CHAST is Suitable for Blue Schools
Caritas Switzerland’s projects in different countries implemented CHAST in their target schools. The new version of CHAST builds on the principles of Blue Schools and can successfully be used for WASH components of Blue Schools, as Caritas Switzerland Blue School projects have shown.