Fabretto enables impoverished Nicaraguan children and their families in underserved communities to break the cycle of poverty and reach their full potentials through programs promoting nutrition, health, education, and community and character development.
A main focus of Fabretto's preventative health workshops is environmental health. Training people to understand and address environmental health issues that affect the community is essential to Fabretto's broader mission. Workshops that encourage better outcomes for individual health and for community development are also integral. Increasing awareness about household energy and indoor air pollution is important to Fabretto's goal of improving community health and development.
Contact Information
The two most important initiatives of Fabretto's Environmental Health Campaign are the organization of local health committees and mobile primary care clinics. Committees were formed at each of the five Fabretto centers, as well as at the twenty-four rural primary schools where Fabretto works directly with education initiatives. The primary functions of the health committees were to identify health risks in their communities, coordinate mobile clinic visits with the doctor, and to plan and organize public health events in their communities. The committees worked closely with the doctor to analyze the conditions in their communities, and identify the most prevalent health problems. Their participation was essential to scheduling clinic visits, as we well as for selecting topics for the public health seminars. Health committee members also organized community visits with students at each center, in order to share with other families the new skills and information that they obtained from the public health seminars. These committees are the key to the sustainability of the Primary Care and Health Services Program, as they will be able to continue to promote health activities in their communities, through Fabretto, the Ministry of Health or other supporting organizations.
The mobile primary care clinic was designed to reach many of the Nicaraguans that cannot easily access basic medical services. Few people in the rural communities Fabretto serves have easy access to basic care. Fabretto’s health staff includes two, full time physicians, who travel to the five centers and twenty four rural schools on a regular basis.
The doctors keep a database on all patients and classify the illnesses treated in order to better understand the health problems in each community, and plan actions to reduce common pathologies. Among the pathologies that afflict many people in these communities, the most prevalent were respiratory infections (35.4%). Cleaner indoor air would certainly reduce the number of respiratory illnesses.
Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas
Open fires have been used in Nicaragua for generations. The tradition of cooking this way is important to the communities and there could potentially be more resistance to improved stoves because of this long-standing tradition.
We hope to use Fabretto centers as a showcase for why it is important to use improved stoves. Since Fabretto's school lunch program is largely run by mothers of students, demonstrating the use of newer, cleaner stoves at the Fabretto centers could convince many families to make the switch.
Two of Fabretto's goals in this partnership are to reduce the amount of wood that a typical family uses and to reduce the pollution children are exposed to. Fabretto is very interested in Proleña, a Nicaraguan organization that sells "ecofogones"--stoves that are safer to use indoors than open fires. Using our connections and reputation in Nicaragua, we hope to convince families to look into stoves that ensure cleaner indoor air. Although we have not started demonstrating these stoves, we hope to introduce them soon to the communities we work with.
We are interested in promoting better practices in the household to improve the health of the families with which we work. We try to practice safe and healthy practices in Fabretto centers and in the schools where we work. Likewise, we want to promote better health and environmental practices at homes of people in the communities that we partner with.
Monitoring methodologies in Fabretto are essential in order to gauge progress and to make necessary modifications to project planning. In 2007 Fabretto implemented the use of QuickBooks, accounting software that allows us to monitor all program- related expenses and integrate them into our accounting department automatically. The new system allows a much higher degree of accountability, ensuring that budgetary plans and constraints are monitored. Field monitoring is also an important part of Fabretto's effort to promote accountability and efficiency. Monitoring of Fabretto's health and nutrition programs is very rigorous and helps us achieve our goals of improving the welfare of Nicaraguan communities.
Relevant Publications or Studies
None noted
Our Contribution to the Partnership
Fabretto hopes to participate by utilizing resources made available by PCIA and helping to disseminate that information to communities in need. Once we have gotten more involved with the project, we hope to publish experiences and success stories of promoting clean indoor air.
