Empowering Communities to Create Healthier Schools
My Healthy Caribbean School (MHCS) is an initiative of the HCC which aims to provide students, teachers and parents with the opportunity to monitor and share information on the school environment with a focus on nutrition and physical activity.
MHCS empowers communities by providing them with the tools to:
1. Learn more about what a healthy school is; 2. Monitor or rate their local schools performance; and 3. Take steps to work together with students, parents, school administrators, and Ministries of Education and Ministries of Health to make their schools healthier.
MHCS is a phased project emerging out of a Letter of Agreement between the HCC and the PAHO. The aim of the LoA is to support civil society capacity building in the area of childhood obesity prevention. In the first phase, MHCS is available in 5 countries namely, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, all of which excluding Trinidad and Tobago are beneficiaries of, and participants in, the HCC project funded by CDB.
Trinidad and Tobago was included based on policy initiatives commenced in 2017 to make schools healthier through, among others, the introduction of a national ban on the sale of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in schools. MHCS will allow communities across Trinidad and Tobago to monitor the extent to which the policy is being implemented.
This is the first time such an initiative has been implemented in the Caribbean and it provides a unique opportunity for Caribbean people, including students and parents, to influence their local school environment through information sharing.
