Projects
Project Summary
Enhancing Community Wellness (ECW)
Enhancing Community Wellness (ECW) is an initiative of Guyana-registered Roraima Learning Trust (RLT), a social enterprise founded to leverage learning for socio-economic development. ECW addresses the growing principal public health scourges (diabetes, hypertension etc) by crafting culturally appropriate messages and delivering them co-ordinately across multiple traditional and social media platforms. ECW will cause participants to be Attracted by, Adopt and Adhere to, healthier lifestyles in respect of what they Eat, increase their propensity to Move more and pay closer attention to how they Feel.
The key ECW outcome metric is changes in waistline circumference, a recognised leading indicator across all of the main chronic conditions. Since the epidemiological approach is fashioned as a double blind test, the Pilot outcomes will have scientific, alongside praxis value.
The aggregated impact of individuals adopting and adhering to healthier wellness lifestyles aggregates to depress the demand for curative public health interventions, allowing the State to divert resources to more general preventative interventions, nurturing a virtuous collective health outcomes cycle across our nation.
Encapsulated in the tripod messaging of EAT WELL, MOVE WELL, FEEL WELL, the Ministry of Health has suggested the ECW pilot program be based out of the Lusignan Diabetes Centre. A previous, single contact intervention that only focuses on the EAT WELL component was adjudged to as achieving 25% ‘success’. ECW’s continuous, multiple platformed and tailored interventions should produce more impressive outcomes.
It is important to note that ECW is focussed on defining the most efficacious delivery modes, not content, which is well established in the science and public health praxis.
Further ECW borrows from the PhilaKahle (Zulu phrase for ‘Living Well’) initiative birthed during COVID 2020 in South Africa led by the Centre for African Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). CASE was co-founded by RLT’s founder along with Mandela’s son-in-law, Dr Kwame Amuah.
Some 30% of the USD 45 000 sought by ECW for this Pilot is to develop the appropriate content to be communicated to the participants. This material will form the bedrock for the national rollout, and is thus nonrecurrent and scalable at zero additional cost.
We at RLT are delighted to be able to explore this partnership with the Greater Guyana Initiative (GGI). Not only do our mandates closely align, GGI’s entry into the Guyanese development space, the development of poultry production and consumption in remote communities, maps well onto ECW’s EAT WELL component.
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