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Since 2003 Puente’s Healthy Families Program has worked with over 6,000 women from over 80 communities in Oaxaca to prevent health problems and malnutrition through the regular consumption of amaranth.
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Puente’s Healthy Families program works with indigenous communities in Oaxaca to foster a more diverse and nutritious diet for their families and help combat child malnutrition through amaranth. Using a participatory approach, the program works with women from vulnerable populations to address some of the root causes of malnutrition in their communities and to make informed decisions regarding the consumption of amaranth.
The program is designed primarily for pregnant and lactating women and the mothers and caretakers of children under five – the groups most vulnerable to the devastating, long term effects of malnutrition.
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Healthy Families Program Activities: Reaching thousands of malnourished children across Oaxaca.
 During the first year in a new community, the Healthy Families team implements an Amaranth Community Awareness Campaign in conjunction with Oportunidades, a welfare program sponsored by the Mexican government. The collaboration is a means to target high-risk participants from the lowest socio-economic group within a particular village. Puente facilitates a series of five monthly workshops to approximately 50 women in each community .The objective during this initial stage is to increase consciousness amongst the at-risk population about the nutrition challenges in their community, the benefits of consuming amaranth and the ease with which it can be included in a variety of local dishes. We will also share with the participants the work being done by those involved in the Eco-Amaranth Program, thus creating awareness of the local availability of this highly nutritious crop.
Participants are encouraged to analyze the relevance of Puente’s amaranth development model for their lives and their communities, looking at both benefits and challenges, and thus make an informed decision about future actions for participating in Puente’s amaranth production and consumption programs.
During this stage community volunteers or Local Amaranth Promoters are identified to provide local insight and participate in the design of all strategies to help ensure their relevance to the local indigenous community and the sustainability of the program into the future.
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Once women are better informed and there are committed amaranth farmers in the community, one of the options is to participate in Puente’s Amaranth Nutritional Intervention. The goal of this intervention is to improve the nutrition amongst the children under five in the community through the regular consumption of amaranth. A support group made up of mothers, health care workers and the Healthy Families team meets monthly to design and implement a strategy to improve their children’s health. Based on the Hearth Positive Deviance Methodology, the women share experiences, monitor the healthy progress of the children that are eating amaranth regularly, learn methods to include amaranth in meals and provide each other with genuine support to improve the nutritional status of their children.
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By being given empirical evidence of improved health in their children while consuming amaranth, the women are able to truly identify amaranth as a viable alternative for good nutrition. These findings are analyzed by the mothers so that they can build a plan to ensure the sustainable presence of amaranth in the diet of the family and the community.
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Puente’s Healthy Families Program also collaborates with other partner organizations to integrate amaranth in their community development strategies. The collaborations allow Puente to further expand the promotion of amaranth consumption amongst populations vulnerable to malnutrition.
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