Connecting Peru's Most Remote Communities With The Policy Makers

As a 2006-2008 IFRTD research project revealed, a severe lack of mobility among communities in Peru's far northern Amazonas region has a significant impact on peoples' ability to access health care services, and a consequentially devastating effect on standards of health and well being.

Indigenous Awajun and Wampi communities living on the River Cenepa in Peru's rainforest border region with Ecuador are among the most remote and excluded communities in the country. Classified as being in extreme poverty, these communities suffer from a combination of factors that obstructs their access to vital medical services, not least the prohibitive cost of transport along the river, limited investment in mobile and outreach health workers and generally poor standards of medical services in the region.

But a new initiative from IFRTD Latin America aims to overcome the immense physical distances by using modern social networking tools and community-created video to reach out to Peruvian politicians and the general public and call for faster progress in addressing the issue of mobility and access to healthcare in this deprived community.

The Messages from the Amazonas project, funded by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (CIPPEC) was designed to communicate the lessons from IFRTD's research in the region to policy makers and help make the case for renewed efforts at improving mobility and access to health services.

Two IFRTD members involved with the original research, Diogenes Ampam Wejin and Silvia Bravo, were joined by two volunteers, Matthew Barker and Franziska Agrawal, to visit the community and record video case studies, before helping to present the hard-hitting video clips to the outside world using popular social networking tools YouTube and Facebook.

The project collected numerous case studies from the community, all of them describing severe health and mobility needs and many painting a desperate picture of healthcare in the area. Illnesses and diseases such as acute diarrhoea and parasitic infection pose severe health risks despite being easily treatable, occurrences of HIV/AIDS infection are well above the average and a disturbing phenomenon of attempted suicide by ingestion of detergents has gone unchecked.

Ana Bravo, IFRTD Latin America Regional Coordinator, said: “This is an exciting and innovative project that aims to empower the community to call for immediate improvements to their mobility and health services. These are tiny communities who barely feature on the radar of national government and whose needs have long been ignored. We are hoping that these new tools will help to break down the enormous barriers between the communities and the policy makers and bring a new impetus to address the community's urgent needs.

IFRTD believes that a multisectoral strategy to address mobility and access to health services, along with a participatory approach to development plants that recognise local service users as legitimate stakeholders with valuable knowledge to offer, would go a long way to alleviating some of the healthcare problems faced in remote communities.

To support the project and the community please visit and subscribe to the YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/MensajesAmazonicos) and become a fan of the project's Facebook profile (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Mensajes-del-Amazonas-Messages-from-the-Amazonas/165090116085?ref=ts).