Community Health Promoters

Non-governmental organizations in Peru have many years of experience working successfully with the model of community health promoters. The public sector has started to establish a system of community health promoters affiliated with the health sector, who would have direct contact with families in their homes, providing outreach, services, and learning activities related to health, hygiene, and nutrition.

The target audiences for the proposed project are school children; school teachers; pregnant and lactating women; adolescent mothers and girls; household in extreme poverty; health professionals and community health promoters.



The content will be generated by health professionals and health promoters from rural communities. They will be supervised by NutriProSalud. All health professionals of NutriProSalud are certificated health professionals: Nutriologists, Doctors, Psychologists, Social Workers. They are senior professionals with more than 20 years of working experience and health practice. Additionally, we have professionals with backgrounds in Food Science, Agriculture and Social Entrepreneurship.

During the work on this project we would stay in close contact with the Ministry of Health and other national programs as CRECER, JUNTOS and HUASCARAN to ensure that requirements are met, adapting the content design if necessary.

The project aims to have active participation of health professionals, school teachers and health promoters and we wish them to create their own discussion platforms.

We invite health professionals and promoters from all target regions (8 regions), also to discuss their problems, needs, curiosities, things that they want to talk about, anything related to community health and health education, their expectations and hopes.

We have defined some discussion topics for a start.
- Community Health and Education, the separation of "practice" and "theory"
- Use of ICTs tools in Community Health

From the pilot and scale-up phases:
- Recover traditional knowledge about native plants and foods.
- A community outreach agent (health professional) in each region.
- An average of two content creators (health promoters) in each community.
- An average of two school teachers, from each community, have received training on community health.
- Capacity building, trainings, organization development.
- 10,000 unique visitors by month.

Before the scale-up period ends, a sustainability meeting will be organized with representatives from social business incubators, microfinancial institutions, public agencies and others to evaluate actions needed to assure the continuity of project once funding is exhausted. Our studies showed that there is a potential to replicate it in Bolivia and Ecuador. We will systematize the lessons learned in order to derive principles and methods applicable in other zones and wider groups. We will hold two national dissemination events.