Teach For Health

Building a Sustainable Health Promotion Infrastructure Among Coffee-Farming Cooperatives in San Ramon, Nicaragua, and Engaging Health Professions Students in Addressing Community-Identified Health Problems

Lack of access to health services and education is one of the biggest problems facing Nicaragua. In San Ramon, a coffee-farming region of 39,000 inhabitants, 60% of the people are living below the poverty line. Prominent health issues include a growing prevalence of chronic respiratory, cardiac and metabolic diseases related to ubiquitous exposure to indoor smoke and changing diets. Lingering infectious water-borne and mosquito-borne illnesses and injuries from occupational hazards and violence are also serious community concerns. Creative and sustained efforts to promote economic diversification, environmental protection, and disease prevention are necessary to improve the community’s health and wellbeing.

Teach for Health (TFH) was founded by medical and nursing students at the University of California – San Francisco in 2009 to develop a health promoter training program serving a population of 12,000 people in 21 coffee-farming cooperatives in San Ramon, Nicaragua.
The San Ramon health promotion project engages community-based participatory research to assess the critical health needs of the community, implementing a program using “train the trainer” methods to empower community selected individuals to take an active role in developing solutions to these needs while training the next generation of health promoters. The ultimate aim of the program is to empower communities to develop their own health agendas, and through creative programming, make measurable changes in health outcomes. Partnerships with local organizations, government organizations, UC Berkeley, and Nicaraguan Universities will allow TFH to become more involved in new areas such as program development and program capacity, as well as to develop similar projects in other parts of the world in accordance with its mission statement: “improving community health globally.”

Principal Investigator: Chris Stewart, PhD, Global Health Sciences, UCSF
Field Location: Coffee-farming cooperatives in San Ramon, Nicaragua
Partners: UCA-San Ramon; Fundacion Cantaro Azul; Organic Health Response; Hesperian Foundation; Sister Communities of San Ramon (SCSR); Casa del Nino; San Ramon Mayor’s Office; Ministry of Health; Peace Corps; Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de la Salud (CIES-UNAN); Global Clinton Initiative, Clinton Foundation; Global Health Sciences, UCSF