PwC India Foundation provides Bengaluru schools with sanitation facilities
The Foundation of PwC India is celebrating the completion of its latest project. The firm built gender segregated toilets and hand washing facilities for two schools in Bengaluru. The project was taken up as a measure to remove discomfort that children in the region face when going to school.
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) are areas where India has traditionally struggled due to poor economic conditions. Lack of resources has made the development of proper sanitation facilities a low priority through the years, leaving numerous villages and smaller cities across the country with unhygienic conditions.
The government has recognised the problem, and launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan (Clean India Mission) in 2014 to help equip villages with toilet facilities and encourage overall cleanliness. While the lack of sanitation has caused considerable health problems, it also appears to have had more indirect repercussions.
PwC has recognised that the lack of proper toilet facilities can even act as a deterrent for children to go to school, particularly amongst female students. Where toilets are not clean and gender segregated, female students struggle to use them with comfort and dignity, a scenario that appears to have had a tangible impact.
Poor sanitation facilities and lack of menstrual health accessibility have contributed to high rates of female dropouts in India, prompting the PwC India Foundation to take action. The foundation was set up in 2008 with the specific objective of identifying areas where the Big Four professional services firm could contribute to social welfare.
Over more than a decade of existence, the foundation has been engaged in a number of areas, having completed well over 80 projects in India and touched as many as 87,000 lives. As of last year, professionals at the firm had devoted 28,000 hours on volunteer basis to contribute to various projects.
The latest project embodies PwC’s own contribution to the WaSH- related issues in India. The foundation not only built gender segregated toilets and hand washing facilities in two schools, but also trained the teachers and students at the school in sanitary practices and provided sanitation kits for students.
Commenting on the project, Vice Chairman at the PwC India Foundation Jaivir Singh said, “Our efforts to augment wash related infrastructure in government schools continues. As a responsible business, we are committed to the Swachh Bharat campaign through this and our many interventions across rural and urban India. As we look to the future, we look forward to engaging with Reaching Hand to run sensitisation exercises in the schools, using the passion and skills of our foundation volunteers.”
