Planting Health and Harvesting Smiles in Rural Communities of Nicaragua

Vital Stats

Renee C

San Francisco, CA

people helped1800
People Doing It 70

The Problem

San Ramon is a region of Nicaragua with approximately 37,000 inhabitants. This rural, coffee farming region of 89 communities is located about 2 hours north of the capital city of Managua. Individual communities ranging from around 200 to 3,000 people are scattered throughout this mountainous region and are connected by dirt roads of varying quality. These small communities surrounding San Ramon have little access to healthcare, with the central health clinic providing basic primary care located up to 6 hours away. Additionally, with limited access to acute care and minimal resources, preventive medicine is especially important to maximize health outcomes and quality of life. There have been many outside development projects initiated in these communities, but in Nicaragua as in most developing countries a lack of focus on community empowerment leads to projects that often fail to continue without outside support and that create new inequalities in communities, resulting in a poorly woven patchwork quilt of government and NGO projects providing scattered basic services that do not meet unique community needs. This program strives to help communities forge their own health and development agendas. It is founded on creative educational methodologies to support the engagement of community volunteers motivated to make social change in their villages, creating a sustainable infrastructure of empowered individuals who will provide committed, incremental improvements in health and well being for their communities.

Plan of Action

Our first and foremost priority is to ensure that any work that we do is in response to the needs vocalized by the community itself rather than opinions from outsiders. The foundation of our project comes from an ongoing process of "community diagnosis and action planning", an innovative methodology involving training community members in identifying, prioritizing and analyzing their social and health problems and developing solutions using existing resources. A community elected group of leaders, men and women, represent each of the 18 communities we currently serve. They are called Health Promoters, or Promotores de Salud. We work directly with them in training them in the process of community diagnosis and action planning. With the information collected from the community diagnosis component of our work, Teach for Health develops strategic partnerships with local government agencies and non-profits to increase access to available resources for community members. Health Promoters are then able to create work plans and implement community change using sustainable and local resources. Throughout this process Teach for Health offers educational workshops for the health promoters on topics such as leadership, strategic planning, resource mapping, Domestic Violence, Family Planning, and goal setting. Our ultimate goal is to expand to all the 89 communities of San Ramon and make a sustainable, locally direct program that promotes health and community-specific development in the San Ramon region.