The Diplomat
Spain has donated to Honduras a total of 254,000 doses of paediatric vaccines against COVID-19 and various measuring equipment for the control of child malnutrition in children under five years of age. The delivery was made by the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, during a visit to the Central American country.
Darias, who was received last Friday by the new Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, symbolically handed over the vaccines at a ceremony in which she was accompanied by the Spanish ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Guillermo Kirkpatrick, and by the Honduran Minister of Health, José Manuel Matheu, and other Honduran authorities.
The delivery of the 254,000 doses of vaccine is the first shipment from Spain of paediatric doses to Latin America and the Caribbean, in addition to the 280,000 doses for adults that our country had already donated through the COVAX mechanism and bilateral agreements. Spain is thus the second largest donor of vaccines against COVID-19 in Honduras.
Darias stressed that this action is part of the commitment of President Pedro Sánchez to help Latin America and the Caribbean to expand their vaccination coverage against COVID-19; a “total” commitment, as demonstrated by the fact that, since Spain began to receive vaccines, it also began to make solidarity donations to third countries.
In this regard, she recalled how our country pledged to donate 50 million vaccines against COVID-19 before the end of the first half of 2022, a goal that has already been achieved several months in advance, according to the Ministry of Health.
For his part, the Honduran Minister of Health thanked the Government of Spain for its contribution to the paediatric vaccination process in the country and stressed the need to continue raising awareness of the importance of continuing to vaccinate against COVID-19.
During her stay in Honduras, among other activities, the Minister of Health handed over several measuring equipment for the control of child malnutrition in the municipality of Teupasenti. This action is part of the EUROSAN DeL pilot project on Comprehensive Care for Children in the Community, which is carried out thanks to the collaboration between the CSAI Foundation and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
The delivery of paediatric scales for the control of children’s weight and measuring rod is already obtaining positive results and will serve as a guide for the rest of the municipalities that are part of the EUROSAN DeL project to implement community strategies.
This equipment will make it possible to monitor three indicators of nutritional status: weight for age, height for age and weight for height.
She was also accompanied at the event by her Honduran colleague, and in her speech, the Minister expressed the Spanish Government’s pride in the results of Spanish cooperation and stressed that there are days that remain in the memory and are remembered forever.
“Like today in this municipality in the Department of El Paraíso; a day on which politics takes on meaning, as one of the most powerful levers of transformation that a society has, when actions that are going to improve people’s lives are carried out,” she said.
Darias held a meeting at the Teupasenti Health Centre with the team coordinating the health networks, the volunteer monitors and the beneficiary mothers of the pilot project on food practices, which is funded by the EU and is aimed at more than 80,000 families in Honduras, 42,000 children and 15,000 women of childbearing age.
The project in Teupasenti, which began in October 2021, has managed to train institutional staff and health volunteers in basic feeding and hygiene techniques for the best development of children according to their age.
To date, 46 volunteer monitors from rural communities, 8 people from the health network coordination team and 45 mothers with children under 5 years of age have received training.
