Camino Verde in Managua and Guerrero Schools

Camino Verde’s SEPA brigades give special attention to primary and secondary schools in their intervention sites. Children and teenagers have great potential as dengue prevention and community health mobilisation agents.

As is the case in every activity linked to CIET’s SEPA methodology, the school visits are centred on the presentation and discussion of entomological (pupae, larvae) and serological (saliva sample results) evidence from the communities themselves. In Managua, brigadistas show a video about the mosquito’s life cycle and encourage questions from and discussion among students about the evidence and the actions that can be undertaken at home and in the community. In primary schools, they show an animated movie about dengue.

In Mexico, brigadistas centre the dialogue on the dengue vector’s life cycle and discuss actions to interrupt it. To do this, they carry out different activities, such as classroom visits (see picture), dramatisations, jigsaw puzzles, lotteries, memory games, word searches and drawing contests.

Classroom response has been excellent. Students are especially interested in survey results and physical evidence of larvae and pupae. Teachers tend to take advantage of the enthusiasm brought on by the visits to charge their students with the task of finding larvae and pupae in the school. Students take the information back to their family members and neighbours or friends. Within their households, they also carry out searches and eliminate or control breeding sites. Also, school visits facilitate access to households for brigadistas, since children and youth identify them as the people who provided them with information about dengue in a school setting.