Reports – Mbuluv Hygiene and Sanitation Workshop

Background and Justification

The crisis in the North West and South West Regions of Cameroon has greatly affected the population with women and the girl child as the most vulnerable groups. As for the girl child, some have become young mothers out of their will, mostly resulting from GBV. For the women, some have become the bread winners of their families as the economic situation for their men have drastically been affected by the consequences of the war. Women have therefore been working extra hard to sustain their families. Livelihood therefore is what women care for. Little wonder, these women as committed as they are, have been involuntarily negligent of some aspects of personal and environmental hygiene which can become detrimental to their health. It is based on this background that OSUDER, in the realization of its main goal to promote and support substantiable development in a bit to foster the empowerment of marginalized and vulnerable groups and communities especially women and young people, organized a one-day workshop on hygiene and sanitation in MBULUV. The workshop was captioned “Health is Wealth”, under the WASH component of OSUDER.

General Objective of the Workshop
 To train women and young girls on hygiene and sanitation as a key to sustain health and wealth.

Specific Objectives

• To sensitize women and girls on good hygiene practices within the crisis (Personal and environmental hygiene)
• To distribute WASH kits to lactating young mothers and personal hygiene kits to mothers who are mostly from the catholic women association.

Realization
The workshop began at exactly 9:00 am with more than expected number of participants at the parish hall in MBULUV. This was applauded by the president of the CWA as she mentioned in her speech that the workshop has revitalized the momentum of the group as most members who had been absent for a while from the group activities showed up for this occasion. In a whole, a total number of 58 women were present for the workshop. 15 of the women were lactating young mothers while 43 were subsistent farmers from around MBULUV. Also attending the workshop were 96 pupils with 45 being boys and 51 girls bringing the total participants to 154.

The workshop was presented in two parts. The first part carried the module on personal hygiene which was followed by interludes of displays by participants who mobilized themselves to make the day interesting and worthy. After the interlude, came the second module on environmental hygiene. At this point, the participants understood health as wealth after interventions by the various facilitators.

At the end of the training, lactating mothers received some sanitary kits from OSUDER while mothers received some emergency kits. It was a colourful atmosphere all together with beautiful family pictures.

Key successes

• 154 parents and youths effectively trained on personal and environmental hygiene.
• Very interactive workshop.
• Workshop went through hitch free.
• Appreciation by participants.

Challenges:

• Tense environment due to the socio-political crisis
• Difficulties to transport the sanitary kits to the training ground due to interruptions from the stake holders.

Conclusion
A better deduction from this training is one big lesson learned which is the fact that our people need a lot of motivation and every little effort by stakeholders is highly appreciated as the impact to people’s psychological and spiritual being cannot be undermined. The training was a success as full attention was given to the training by participants and above all, it went on hitch free.

Reported by George Baye