Wara Blong Life Project - more information.

Registration

Register by emailing the project organiser

with the following information:

Class level:
School name:
Contact person name:
Contact person email:
Contact person phone:
School postal address:

Participants

Click here to read which classes throughout New Zealand are also participating

Resources

Why is handwashing important?

Wara Blong Life resource list

Further background material on the Oxfam Water for Survival Programme in the Eastern highlands can be found here and here.

Click here for the Wara Bilong Life project Timeline

Questions?
Students may post questions about any aspect of the project by email. These questions will be answered by experts from Oxfam's Water for Survival programme.

Wara Bilong Life is a fun, interactive, classroom activity where students learn about global water and sanitation issues through a creative process.

Aims
The aims of Wara Bilong Life are to encourage email communication and collaboration, the sharing of ideas and information between students throughout New Zealand to encourage 'out of the square' creative problem solving in a 'real world' context.

The situation in many Eastern highland schools

Papua New Guinea ranks among the bottom ten nations worldwide for access to clean, safe water and sanitation.

Currently in many Eastern highland schools, water tanks often only provide half a litre of clean water per student per day. Water can only be collected from metal roofs. Some schools have a thatched roof making water collection impossible. River water is often contaminated and located a long way from the school, although students bring a bottle of water from their village.

Very few schools have handwashing facilities and until recently, only a few of the schools had toilets. The schools do not collect enough school fees to build enough sanitation and hand-washing facilities for students and the government provides little assistance.

Unfortunately, the high incidence of typhoid and other diseases are a result of the lack of handwashing facilities. Also, there are little health education materials in the schools.

The creative process includes learning about:

the importance of clean water, and investigating how it is supplied
how water-borne diseases are passed from one person to another
exactly what hand cleaning is required to prevent disease
whether all hand-cleaning methods require water
what type of mechanism could dispense a small amount of water at a time

Using this information you are asked to design and make a prototype of a method of washing hands that requires very little water, produced from recycled materials.

Education materials should accompany the prototype. There should be two sets of education materials - one for Papua New Guinea schools and one for New Zealand schools.

Evaluation
These solutions will be evaluated by members of Oxfam's Water for Survival programme.