We introduce ‘Pepe’, a social robot for encouraging proper handwashing behaviour among children. We discuss the motivation, the robot design and a pilot study conducted at a primary school located in the Western Ghats mountain ranges of Southern India with a significant presence of indigenous tribes. The study included individual group interviews with a randomly selected sample of 45 children to gauge their perception of the Pepe robot across various dimensions including gender, animacy technology acceptance. We also discuss some HRI implications for running user studies with rural children.