Expanding Healthy Habits: MOHW Adds More Schools to ‘Healthy Schools, Healthy Belize’ Initiative

The Ministry of Health and Wellness (MOHW) is preparing to expand its initiative, “Healthy Schools, Health Habits, Healthy Belize”.  The initiative, which promotes eating healthy food and snacks to students, began last school year with 18 schools in the Belize District. Fast forward today, the ministry is adding four more schools to the list and will be scaling up the level of awareness activities in participating schools. Robyn Daly Faber, Nutrition Technical Advisor for the Ministry, says that over the past year, five health expos and hundreds of school presentations have been conducted. 

Robyn Daly Faber, Nutrition Technical Advisor, Ministry of Health and Wellness: “There are three persons that we target with this program. So we target parents, we target teachers and we target the students themselves. And we also work along with, we do sensitization with the persons who are selling at the schools. So we would do sensitization sessions with them also. So since then we’ve been able, we have statistics, we’ve been able to do surveys with the children, with the students, I should say because they’re different ages. And we’ve looked at eating and behavior survey. We’ve done about 628 surveys within the schools primary and secondary. We’ve also done 618 nutrition presentations in schools. We have our team that’s on the ground doing monitoring as well with these schools. We’ve had a few documentaries, we’ve had reels, we’ve had some educational campaign messages, posters that we’ve shared with schools. We’ve also, when we do the nutrition presentations, we do a pre-test and a post-test. So we are collecting data to see how the impact has been and that helps us with our indicators that we’re monitoring. And going into the new school year we’re expanding. So what we are planning to do this school year is roll out to some more schools within the district. So we’re still working with Belize City, Belize District, I should say, but we want to start spreading the messages and the work and the education within the district. So we’re working with three to four schools within the districts and we plan to have our teams in the districts do the education, look at the surveys that we’re giving out to the students, work along with teachers. We do teacher trainings and we also do health assessment with teachers.”

Daly Faber says that a major thrust of the program is the phase-out of selling sugary drinks in schools, which is being done in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.

Robyn Daly Faber, Nutrition Technical Advisor, Ministry of Health and Wellness: “The Ministry of Education is our collaborative partner and they also have similar programs that has been complementing this one as well, which is their school feeding program. That is also a program that complements what we’re doing. So those schools that are a part of the Healthy Start program, they’re not allowed to sell sodas or sweetened drinks to the students or even serve that within the campuses. Also, I know that they have a campaign as well that helps us to emphasize what we are trying to work along with the schools to do. So with all of us working together on the same objectives we find that we’re getting very good support with it. What I think has been very effective is doing the education sessions and the campaigns within the schools, working along with the children or the students themselves. We want to empower them to make that decision. I know ideally would want to just make a law and say take them all out of schools and there is no sold sweetened beverages. That would be easy to do, but it is a process to get that done. And I think the process that we’re working on is the sensitization of this, this message, this initiative. And there are many areas that we try to compliment. So we don’t want to look at we’re coming down hard to just to get this sweetened drinks out but we want to talk about and educate the teachers and the school community, and even the parents, the parents play a very big role in this as well. Why is it that the sugar drinks are not good for you? What is something healthier that we can use? Because you will hear about the cost, you will hear about all of this. So we are highlighting a lot of drinking water and that ties in also with our Beat the Heat campaign. It’s so hot these days and everything. So we’re highlighting, let’s get more water into the schools. Let’s minimize the sale of the sweetened drinks and have more water.”

The Ministry of Health is also conducting surveys and analyzing data to determine the impact of the program and help guide future interventions.