January 25 saw a training seminar take place in Nairobi to educate elementary school teachers about the links between contaminated drinking water, poor hygiene and personal health. The aim is to enable teachers to explain the health impacts of drinking dirty water to their pupils. The seminar also taught hygiene practices that help to reduce the spread of pathogens and diarrhea in particular. To ensure that students take the theoretical lessons learned and put them into practice in their everyday lives, the training is based on the principle of learning through discovery. This methodology is also at the heart of “Experimento”, Siemens Stiftung’s international science and technology education program, which was introduced in Kenya for the first time in 2014.
20 local elementary school teachers from schools in Nairobi were trained as Experimento multipliers in the course of 2014. Now they also took part in the hygiene training for the first time in order to reinforce the topic of health and hygiene in their own schools and workshops too. Experimento Project Manager in Kenya, Rebecca Ottmann: “The teachers bring valuable practical knowledge to the sessions and a great deal of motivation. Their feedback shows that when people try things out themselves in experiments, causal relationships are made easier to understand and remembered more effectively as a result”.
Siemens Stiftung offered hygiene training seminars at five locations in Kenya last year. More are set to follow this year.