A Proud Moment for Hadiabad village, Bihar. Yesterday they got the status of ‘Nirmal Gaon’ (clean village) under the national-level programme. If we recall, last Nov’16 the village was declared Open Defecation Free since almost all villagers had built toilets and pledged not to defecate in the open.

From there on it was a continuous effort to drive behavioral change and now six months from then, a whole bunch of officials (from block, district level, divisional level & including team from Delhi) came to examine and were satisfied to find a total elimination of the practice of open defecation. This village thus becomes entitled for ‘Nirmal Gaon Award’ launched by the Govt. of India under its ‘Total Sanitation Campaign’, which will ensure more facilities to it.

An ‘all women’ sanitation committee, formed with support from AMMACHI Labs’ deployment team last year and the repeated visits to block office followed by the immense effort put by our facilitator, Community Organizer and others have stirred this, bringing vast improvement in sanitation standard. These resources are now doing a vigilance duty of a different kind i.e., keeping a check no one defecates in open and continuously persuading people to stick to changed habits.

More gallant is the visited high level officials praised our women leaders for playing a crucial role and requested them to help spread this awareness across other villages, as so far Hadiabad is the ONLY village in it’s block and panchayat to have achieved this feat.Their hard work and dedication bearing fruits now!!

#empowerwomen ‪ #sanichampion #womenempowerment, #ODFree
#WECSDP #GenCen #championsofchange #AServe #undef #CLTS #LifeSkills #CO

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