In March 2020 Children for Health’s founder and CEO, Clare Hanbury travelled to Mozambique for 11 days to continue her work with the PCAAN nutrition programme. She shared her journey progress with followers on LinkedIn, read on to see what she got up to!

Key objectives in our recent work in Mozambique was to demonstrate that children can quickly and easily:

1. Identify health topics of concern to themselves and their families;
2. Learn one or two simple key ‘nuggets’ of information linked to the topics that can be passed on to friends and family too;
3. Learn one or two short health messages that they can turn into song and dance and drama;
4. Create a question or two linked to the topic that can be discussed with family members; and
5. Create a simple three-part health action plan which they can implement with their friends with a teacher to support and encourage them.

We think it would take a half day (tops) to ‘train’ teachers in this simple system and, as long as the school principal is supportive, take a couple of hours per term to keep the system rolling along.

Teachers would need to check in with the children and offer encouragement and the school management find opportunities for the children who have prepared songs and drams and messages to share these and involve other children (ideally all the children). I always knew this was easy and possible but it was good to be able to ‘show’ it working so well.

Here is one of our health messengers creating her health action plan.