Hygiene with Chhota Bheem
Hygiene with Chhota Bheem is a play-based learning programme designed to encourage hand washing with soap and toilet use among children aged 7 - 11 in India.
Role: Project Manager & Lead Learning Designer
Lead Organisation: Engagement Lab, Emerson College, Boston, USA
Partners: MACT (India), Green Gold Animation (India), UNICEF, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India
Funder: UBS Optimus Foundation
Learners: Children of ages 7-11, educators, and community health workers across India
Sector: Health
Project website: https://elab.emerson.edu/hygiene/?en=
The Brief
Hygiene with Chhota Bheem was designed by the Engagement Lab in 2017-18 as a mobile game and structured series of activities in Tamil designed to raise awareness of and inculcate best practices for health and hygiene among children aged 7-11 in Tamil Nadu, India.
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After testing the project on the ground with 30 schools, the teachers and students found the curriculum to be rigid, and challenging to implement. In the final year of the project, the Engagement Lab brought me on board as the Project Manager to re-design the learning programme, manage resources and the team, and deliver and scale the curriculum across Tamil Nadu and the rest of India.
My Design Process
Based in Boston, USA, I led design, implementation, grant management, documentation, and partnership development for this hygiene education project in India. I established a rapport with the multidisciplinary teams of design, technology, and communication experts in Boston and the implementation team in India to ensure open channels of communication and equal ownership of tasks throughout the design process.
I facilitated the collection of user feedback to identify what worked, and what needed improvement. Throughout the process, I made sure our team communicated effectively with all stakeholders (our funders, government officials, health experts, educators, and learners) to ensure a participatory and iterative design approach.
I helped translate all the Tamil learning resources in Hindi and English to help the programme scale in other parts of India, and also designed a flexible training workshop for health workers and facilitators to use and adapt the toolkit to the learning needs of the communities they worked with.
In July 2019, I worked with the India and US teams to run a large-scale digital and on-ground hygiene awareness campaign #BeatGermsWithBheem to great success.
To help our project successfully scale across India, I forged new relationships with health researchers from UNICEF, and the Ministry of Education and Health and Family Welfare. To document our design process and to effectively communicate our work to a wider audience, I helped design the project website, published multiple case studies, and have published a series of online blogs on our pedagogy of play and sustainable model of growth.
I created a framework of Discover>Act>Advocate that facilitators can use to create their own learning experiences.
Outcome
Hygiene with Chhota Bheem is a play-based learning programme designed to encourage hand washing with soap and toilet use among children aged 7 - 11 in India. Our mobile game, hands-on activities, story books & videos (available in English, Tamil, and Hindi) can be accessed from our website (https://elab.emerson.edu/hygiene/).
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I have also published a series of online blogs {Link} on our design journey, and collected multiple case studies {Link} to document the tremendous work by our team of trained facilitators.
Impact
The revised Hygiene with Chhota Bheem toolkit of resources has now reached almost 20,000 children across India, and we have trained more than 800 educators in the curriculum. These numbers are still growing!
To create a supportive community of Hygiene with Chhota Bheem facilitators, I created a WhatsApp group for all the facilitators we trained. One year on, the group is still active, with facilitators sharing details and images of new trainings they hold, and how they have adapted Hygiene with Chhota Bheem resources during the COVID-19 crisis.
Health workers testing an activity from our facilitation guide to check if the play and language suits their needs.
A young facilitator in Bihar reading our storybook to the children she works with.
Some of the amazing children who participated in the #BeatGermsWithBheem campaign in July 2019.