schools

The new Schools Water Portal website promises to be one of the most comprehensive, progressive, and exciting compendium of free resources available for teaching about water. The website provides materials for students, teachers, principles, and schools. Others are encouraged use the materials, too.

For example, how many schools do you know about in the United States with rainwater harvesting systems? Among other things, this website provides basic information on rainwater harvesting in schools in India. Arghyam, the founding organization, says:

The portal contains several colourful presentations, plays, debate topics, quizzes, water stories, fun water science, and more all with water as the focal theme. The busy teacher could use these for enlivening the class or to teach better a difficult topic. All these materials follow the set syllabus and are for free download.

The high caliber of this web resource is not surprising. Arghyam previously developed the India Water Porta l and the India Sanitation Portal websites.

“Wash-in-Schools” (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) is a campaign to ensure safe drinking water and sanitation facilities for schoolchildren throughout the world. This program, first introduced by UNICEF and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council at the 3rd World Water Forum in 2003, has been joined by growing list of non-profit organizations, foundations, corporations, and schools.

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Water Advocates, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, will be launching their Wash-in-Schools Initiative on March 12, 2008. This non-profit has the goal to expand the WASH program to 1,000 schools in developing countries while creating the momentum to help as many additional schools as possible worldwide.

The public is invited to the official Water Advocates WASH-in-Schools Initiative Launch:

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The National Geographic Society Grosvenor Auditorium
1600 M Street NW, Washington, DC

The event will feature videos of schoolchildren in the developing world as well as comments from individuals including Dr. Peter Gleick, President and Co-founder Pacific Institute; Gil Garcetti, Photographer of “Water is Key: A Better Future for Africa;” and Alexandra Cousteau, co-founder Earth Echo International.

For more information on how you can be involved, please contact Andra Tamburro at 202-293-4047 or atamburro@wateradvocates.org.

To attend the event, please RSVP to Katie Delisio at WaterAdvocatesRSVP@gmail.com.