The Sinangpad Healthy Village Project is located in Kalinga. Kalinga is a mountainous province in the north of the Philippines: some of its villages lack of vehicular access and can take up to 8 hours to reach by foot. Educational levels in the rural areas tend to be low, with a significant proportion of some tribal groups being illiterate. The main means of livelihood for villagers are rice and wheat cultivation. Pigs and hens are also raised. Key health problems in the province include diarrheal diseases, respiratory infections, tuberculosis, malaria (including drug resistant malaria), parasitism and malnutrition. The risk of the spread of these illnesses is exacerbated by a number of water and environmental sanitation issues, including poor access to safe drinking water, good breeding conditions for mosquitoes, no means of safe garbage disposal and animal management practices that can result in significant risks to human health.
History
Between 1998 and 2003, Kalinga was one of six provinces participating in a bilateral ADB-AusAID funded Project with a significant community health development component. One cornerstone of the implementation of this Project in Kalinga was helping NGOs to work closely with 14 villages to promote good health. It became very clear from this Project that to improve health in these communities, it was not enough just to disseminate health messages. Communities had to be convinced that illness in the family was not 'just part of life', rather that the occurrence of illness was something that members of the community had some control over, and that to exercise this control the community needed to work together. Through intensive one-on-one work with villages, it was possible to help the villagers recognize just how much they could improve their health situation themselves. The AusAID project was phased out in 2003, but on a return visit by one of the former project team in 2005, it was found that much of the earlier health improvement in some of these communities had been sustained, and that the Provincial Health Office was endeavouring to replicate the work but struggling with lack of funds. Action Aid Australia is currently providing funds to help the Provincial Health Office to help continue community health development.
Aims
While working one-on-one with villages to help them improve their own health situations had proved very effective in the AusAID project, it is clearly financially impractical for Provincial Health Offices to do this with every village in their administrative area. Consequently it was decided to work with the Provincial Health Office in Kalinga to:
- continue to reduce the incidence of water and environmental-related illnesses in villages by helping the villagers to change behavior that increases the risk of the transmission of such illnesses; and
- trial a community-based health intervention strategy which can be used to reach a large number of villages in a cost-effective manner and hence can be replicated in other Provinces.
Focus
The main focus of the Project is the development of very simple manuals specific to the Kalingan context. These manuals can be used by communities to diagnose the key water and environmental sanitation problems in their own community, to realize the possible impact of these problems, and to plan low-cost strategies for overcoming these problems. Intensive training courses are being held in any interested communities on how to use these manuals and how to go about encouraging health behaviour change. Those communities interested in continuing to participate after the training are then assisted with developing a plan and mentored over a period of time. Small amounts of money are provided to help communities undertake action necessary to remove barriers to behavioural change, such as money for the purchase of materials to construct sanitary latrines in the village. However, such money is only provided once the community has started to take action themselves. |
