In our project in the highlands of Bolivia with farming households, we are working to improve household diets through improved animal husbandry practices with chickens and sheep. New on the HealthBridge website is our “World Premiere” of a video I made with my son, Christopher, in which we explain and demonstrate the sheep husbandry practices we are promoting.

Overall the work is going well and the households are adopting the recommendations, but there are challenges. One of the biggest challenges is reaching more households. We planned on working with 1000 households in twenty communities. The census data indicated an average of 50 households per community and we had the resources to reach 20 communities. The “rate-limiting step” in the project is entering a community, sparking their interest in the project, and developing a plan with them on how the work would proceed. Once a community is onboard reaching all, or almost all, of the families is relatively straight-forward.

So it was somewhat frustrating when we realized that the community populations were far smaller than the census indicated. Due to high migration to the cities, there is now an average of only about 20 households per community.

A short time ago we reached the 20th community – about six months ahead of schedule – and last week we reached three more communities. However these 23 communities only include about 500 households. So we are continuing to reach out to new communities to try and spread the good word of improved animal husbandry for improved nutrition to as many households as possible. We are thrilled to be able to exceed our objective for number of communities, but disappointed that we have reached only about half the households we thought we would have reached by this point. We will continue to work over the last year of the project to achieve a big effect with as many people as possible.