Dear All,

Since our last newsletter, the books we were creating for Save the Children in India and Nigeria have been completed and sent. You may remember that the focus of this programme is on what children can do to help implement the WHO 7-point plan at part of the Save the Children ‘community mobilisation’ strategy. This is a proven strategy to prevent and control Diarrhoea.

We have worked with the Save the Children team and Clare has now completed four training workshops and trained teachers from 48 schools in Lagos and we have completed:

• A Master Trainers Guide, A Teaching Guide;
• an Activities for Children Guide;
• a Monitoring Guide and
• a Speaking Book Guide on how to use the Speaking Book (Bayo’s Journey to Save Lola from Diarrhoea) in the classroom. The Speaking Book is something we wrote last year.

Also, we worked with our artist to create a special bookmark to be used alongside The Speaking Book – a special audio book being distributed to all 48 of the schools. On the bookmark are printed the 12 messages for children to learn and share and these will be given to the many thousands of children attending these 48 schools once they have listened to the book. The bookmark is just one of the tools that children can use to share the messages with their families and friends.

We then adapted this suite of materials for the Indian programme too and is currently being adapted and translated into Hindi.

The teachers we trained in Nigeria and the Master Trainers we trained in India are already busy putting the training into practice and we are in touch with these groups regularly using the mobile app, “WhatsApp”. It’s so encouraging to be receiving pictures and videos of children in their clubs and trainees in their workshops. We know that our ideas are spreading!

In May our focus of the month was ‘Diarrhoea’. We have so much information on this topic having worked with Save the Children for two years to pull together the best content and activities Children for Health has to offer! To begin with, have a look at how to make a Dehydration Doll and how it can help children understand how important hydration after diarrhoea is.

Also in May we also developed content for the Be He@lthy, Be Mobile group at WHO/ITU. They are working to use mobile phone campaigns to reach people with information on non-communicable diseases to positively impact their health. One of these campaigns is on Smoking and Tobacco. By way if introducing ourselves to this group and highlighting ‘what children can do’, we prepared a document which we then summarised on our blog for World No Tobacco Day (25^th May). For more information click here.

This month (June) our focus is on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. This is a topic that is also very closely related to Diarrhoea and a topic where children already have a lot of responsibility for themselves and other younger children and where lots of improvements can be made when the adults enlist the help of children in ways that are ‘sticky’ and ‘fun’. Also in June, we shared a lesson plan to help children understand how important hand washing is by playing the “But Why?” game.

Clare has been busy making videos. Our community will be the first to know when these are published. She found it pretty scary at first but soon got into her stride. Children for Health is very easy to talk about – with so much great work going on all over the world!

Clare is also making headway and forging an academic partnership with the nutrition team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Clare has been included in the team on a research project proposal to use the Children for Health content and activities to help young adolescents address the issues related to stunting in Malawi. We are very keen to be at the forefront of important research that collect evidence on the effectiveness of children in spreading positive health messages and practices.

In the last couple of weeks… exciting things are developing in Mozambique and a great new partnership with Worldreader has begun! Worldreader is a digital literacy charity and is on a mission to bring digital books to every child and her family, so that they can improve their lives. Using e-readers, mobile phones and other digital technology, they reach readers in 53 countries, providing them with over 40,000 book titles in 43 languages from Kiswahili to Hausa. They work with over 150 publishers to acquire and digitise content. They are delighted to be including our books in their library.

Thanks so much for being in our community. Please forward this Newsletter to friends, colleagues or anyone else who may like to use our content and join our community. Follow-up on Facebook and Twitter.

Best wishes

Clare