Masti clean is a programme designed and conceptualized to teach good hygiene practices to children in low-income communities where hygiene is not seen as a priority.
Masti Clean's central tool, is the $1 hygiene kit that contains 4 toiletries that are essential to personal hygiene. The kit is supported by teaching aids and impact trackers for teachers.
Winner of WPPed Cream Silver Award in Design for good catergory
Illustrator: Rukhmini Bhatia
Creative Director: Ektaa Aggarwal
It all started with a yellow duck.
While I was working in Mumbai at 369 Inc., a boutique design studio, my creative director and I invited 15 street children from a nearby slum to the studio for a small project called “The Yellow Duck Project”. We wanted to observe and understand the children’s creativity by giving each a set of Lego pieces. Unknown to the children, each set was pre-designed to build a tiny yellow duck. However, we asked the children to create anything they could think of with the pieces. We presumed they would use their imagination to create something mysterious and abstract, removed from their daily lives. However, what they created was very different from our expectations: they created ladders, buckets, faucets, all kinds of practical household items. That is when I realized that these children did not know of anything outside their daily lives. We wanted to do something to stimulate their imagination—something every child should have an abundance of. So, we started teaching them art and English every evening. Two years with them taught me plenty about their needs.
I gained some valuable insights into their problems and started applying my skill as a designer to help solve them. That is how Masti Clean came to life.
Masti Clean is a $1 hygiene programme for street children. The programme includes a kit with hygiene products and a three month educational curriculum. Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death among urban street children in India. 64% of the diarrhea morbidity can be decreased by simple solutions like hand washing. Unfortunately, the kids knew nothing about hygiene. They would leave dirty hand prints all over the white walls of the studio. Even though we had taught them the importance of hand washing, I realized they were not practicing it. Keeping this in mind, we created a hygiene kit which included soaps, shampoos, lice hair oil and other such useful products. The kit was designed using Indian pop culture references and personifying each hygiene product in the kit to make it more relevant to the children. Today, the kit is distributed to various schools and I am proud and happy to see 500 children using it and learning from the programme.