Last Mile Health
Baselining Ag and Health needs: Last December, when I was fortunate enough to start the MaolKeki Foundation, I decided that I would focus on health and agriculture, implemented jointly, besides education as the core areas. This vision was recently brought to life through a tomato productivity program that we launched in July 2018 in partnership with Syngenta Foundation India in the state of Manipur. As part of the launch, we organised information sessions very early in the morning to catch farmers and farm workers on their way to the fields. The idea was to inform them of the upcoming program, get some basic health parameters measured and get a baseline assessment of what we needed to do during the season.
What we found, apart from the fact that they had limited knowledge of modern standards of growing tomatoes, was astonishing. Many of the farmers we interacted with:
- Had not seen a doctor in years as they were too busy
- Could not read the tomato crop program we were distributing due to poor eyesight
- Complained of various aches and pains, including some with breathing problems
- A lot of the farmers also had high blood pressure (40%) and were generally overweight (49%) as you can see from the charts below:
