School Health Annual Report Programme the largest School Health Network

SHARP, the acronym for school health annual report programme, an NGO registered in 1999 has been working on using ICTs to manage the records of school children across schools in 40 centres in India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the group relies on the school volunteers (students and teachers) who get trained to monitor nutritional and health status of school children in urban and rural schools, across government run schools and private schools. Keeping in mind the privacy of the needs, the programme allows access of health records to the students and their parents through a username and password, to the teachers who are data input persons of the records, and to the local Public Health practitioner in the area.

The project is one of the partners of the Intel's World Ahead Programme, and the software has been written by Tata Consultancy Services.

The SHARP project has worked with the VIIT's Baramati based schools to run the project.

According to Dr. Puran Prakash, the General Secretary of SHARP, "Creating a network of health promoting schools, children, their families, hospitals, health professionals, UN and Development Agencies, NGOs, and corporate houses, has ensured that promoting health through schools is the most cost effective health approach and the investments made in school health yeild ever lasting returns."

A project that is worth documenting! For more details write to sharp@schoolindia.org