Awareness 360

The Elevate Prize not only provides a large amount of funding to help scale up the impact, but also tailored support in terms of strategic advice, mentorship and visibility. It is a holistic package of resources that can help me advance my organization's work to the next big level and let me meet and potentially collaborate with like-minded changemakers. Hence, I am applying for the Elevate Prize.

I have identified the current gaps and challenges in my organization, which I tend to mitigate using the Elevate Prize funding and support in the following ways:

1. Invest in full-time human resource to continue our operations smoothly. My organization is a youth-led, voluntary, global non-profit that works across 23 countries, mobilizing over 1500 young people. Currently, we have zero paid employees. Everyone in my core team has been working voluntarily for the past seven years.

2. Provide facilities like toilets, hand-washing stations, water filters etc. to our target communities and continue our awareness interventions.

3. Establish WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) libraries in primary & secondary schools in Bangladesh, to ensure WASH knowledge and best practices are normalized among children/youth.

4. Invest in marketing to mobilize more young people and partners to join our movement.

I am a Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Activist from Bangladesh. My passion for WASH stemmed from the tragic loss of my mother in 2014, who died from diarrhea after being sick for only one day. Her death made me realize the critical role WASH can play in saving lives from preventable diseases like diarrhea. I was unaware of the global WASH crisis. I did not want anybody else to go through the same, so I was driven to transform my pain into passion. Four days after my mother's death, I did my first WASH Talk at an isolated sewerage workers' community who are often considered "untouchables" or "unclean". I saw the potential impact I could bring, and hence I continued my WASH activism ever-since, with a vision to ensure clean water & sanitation for all. This later took up the form of a youth-led, global, non-profit called Awareness 360. In the past 7 years we have grown to operate in 23 countries across 3 continents, mobilizing over 1500 young volunteers, benefitting over 150,000 people through our awareness projects for different marginalized communities like the sex-workers, refugees, people with disabilities, school children, slum dwellers, etc., supporting the UN SDGs.

4.5 billion people, more than half the world population, do not have access to safely managed sanitation. World leaders failed to prioritize WASH, and a pandemic had to come our way to teach us handwashing! We need 3 times the current global investment to achieve our clean water and sanitation goal by 2030 (SDG 6).

Furthermore, 45,000 people annually die from diarrhea, a preventable disease, in my home country Bangladesh. Globally, it is the second leading cause of death for children under age 5. And access to Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH) is intricately linked to this problem. That's where we come in. 

At Awareness 360, we raise awareness about clean water and sanitation, handwashing, water filtration technique, menstruation, sexual & reproductive health, how to make eco-friendly cloth pads at home, neglected tropical diseases etc. among vulnerable and marginalized communities such as the sewage workers, sex-workers, under-resourced school children, slum dwellers, refugees, etc. ; fostering behavioral change adopting healthy habits by helping them realize its long term impact in reducing extreme poverty. We also empower young people in 23 countries by giving them the skills, resources, tools, mentorship and inspiration to identify community issues and conduct their own social action projects.

We do not do one-off awareness programs. We offer tailored interventions to our target beneficiary communities. We conduct pre-project surveys, focus group discussions and key informant interviews to thoroughly understand the WASH awareness level in the community. Accordingly, we customize our WASH Talks. We also change our delivery method depending on our audience. For eg, when we are working at a sex-workers' community, we speak in local dialect, play games and quizzes, let them dance to hard-core local music of a genre to their taste, and make them feel more connected with us. In contrast, when we are talking to school children, we play animated cartoon videos, do paintings, etc. to deliver our message across. Once the workshop is done, we do post-project surveys and follow up every 3-6 months; ensuring the communities are practicing what they learned to induce behavioral change. We are creating a value for WASH in these communities, not only in terms of health, but also sharing how WASH investment has an economic return helping them come out of extreme poverty. We also remain mindful of our environmental sustainability while designing projects, such as not printing banner/t-shirts etc. or using plastics unless absolutely necessary.

We are fighting for access to basic human rights like clean water, sanitation and healthcare for communities who are often forgotten/left behind. We are working at the grassroots, helping these last mile communities realize how better health can lead them to coming out of extreme poverty. We are breaking the taboo around menstruation, so that menstruators do not drop out of school after menarche. Moreover, we try to form allies with non-menstruators to normalize period in the entire community. We teach girls and women how to make sustainable, eco-friendly, comfortable, and affordable reusable cloth pads at home; since they cannot afford the expensive pads due to imposed tax. Due to our interventions, absentees' rate at schools dropped, as children were less sick from WASH related diseases. Communities became healthier and more productive.

During Covid-19 lockdown, when the sex-workers community was suffering from hunger, we reached out with food and hygiene supplies, shedding a spotlight on how helpless they were. 

We also share our experience at the grassroots level by influencing world leaders at high level policy forums to increase investment in this sector. This way, we are contributing to solving two major problems: lack of community awareness & investment from governments.