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Girls in charge: How the Oky period tracker app empowers girls and helps to close the digital divide

March 25, 2025

Girls in charge: How the Oky period tracker app empowers girls and helps to close the digital divide

The Oky app gives girls of all abilities the information they need to manage their periods and answers their questions about sexual and reproductive health. As an inclusive digital solution created ‘by girls, for girls,’ it offers an entry point to practice and improve digital skills.

A call to action: A new social impact campaign tackles menstrual taboos

February 28, 2025

A call to action: A new social impact campaign tackles menstrual taboos

A global campaign aims to tackle taboos, ignorance and misinformation about menstrual health and hygiene by using the award-winning German-Kenyan social impact film Impure as a catalyst for change.

How positive activism can inspire development cooperation

July 22, 2024

How positive activism can inspire development cooperation

How can the broader public be mobilised to stand up for development goals like water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and gender equality?

An integrated solution for healthcare waste takes off in Nepal

June 13, 2024

An integrated solution for healthcare waste takes off in Nepal

In Nepalgunj, a Central Treatment Facility safely manages infectious waste from 190 different health facilities. Does this public-private partnership hold the answer to one of Nepal’s most intractable problems?

How hospitals in Nepal are making waste their business

April 16, 2024

How hospitals in Nepal are making waste their business

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, major hospitals across Nepal have set up environmentally friendly systems to segregate, treat and dispose of healthcare waste. The results? Cleaner premises, safer working conditions, no more burning of waste and welcome revenue from the sale of recyclables.

WASH

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are crucial for human life and health.

Every year almost seven million children die before their fifth birthday, many from preventable diarrhoeal diseases. About 780 million people have no access to safe drinking water, and more than one third of the world’s population live without even basic sanitation. Access to water can be a challenge, both in urban slums with congested public fountains and in rural areas, where collecting water for the household can require a long and sometimes dangerous trek by women or children to a distant well or waterhole. 

A third to a half of schools and even health facilities in developing countries lack clean water and/or sanitation, making them a potential source of contamination. Lack of privacy in schools’ sanitary facilities restricts particularly girls’ access to education.

German development cooperation sees the realisation of the human right to water and sanitation as key to sustainable development and poverty reduction. As can be read in the articles and studies on this page, this immense challenge requires multidimensional efforts, allying sustainable infrastructure development (e.g. integrated and climate-sensitive urban sanitation systems) with impacting beneficiaries’ knowledge, attitude and practice concerning hygiene, as in adapted FIT for School programmes.

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