Community Perspectives About Sociocultural Conditions Associated With Children's Health Among the Nasa People in Colombia

What Is the Purpose of This Study?

• • This study was aimed at identifying the sociocultural conditions that influence children's health situation at a Nasa Indigenous Reservation in Huila, Colombia, from the perspectives of various community actors.

What Is the Problem?

• • Health inequalities that affect indigenous peoples have been well documented by international organizations such as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Pan American Health Organization.

• • Some indicators of indigenous health in Colombia show infant mortality rates as high as 200 per thousand live births for the Yukpa people of the municipality of Becerril-Cesar, 166 for the Awá of Ricaurte-Nariño, and 142 for the Embera in Quibdó-Chocó.

• • In comparison with a national rate of 17, these rates show the limitations of the state to guarantee health rights for indigenous boys and girls thus posing them at an imminent life risk.

• • At the Huila Nasa reservation (Iquira-Huila), for example, there were a total of 5 infant deaths in the year previous to the study which made the reservation the one with the highest infant mortality rate in the state of Huila.

• • Understanding community perspectives about the sociocultural determinants of children's health is crucial to developing effective and culturally appropriate public health interventions to address this pressing issue.

What Are the Findings?

• • Participants from the community perceive an increase in preventable diseases, malnutrition, and infant mortality associated with changes in their ways of life.

• • The key sociocultural conditions that the community think are affecting children's health include the following.

  • ○ Displacement from their ancestral territories to other contexts where mestizo people live.

  • ○ The loss of ancestral customs including protection rituals. This is explained by the loss of credibility on the traditional medicine and it is especially true among the youngest.

  • ○ Changes in lifestyle and agricultural and nutritional practices associated with the transition from food autonomy to external food dependence.

  • ○ Parental neglect and the limited intervention and control exercised by community authorities on this subject.

  • ○ The high level of environmental pollution in the territory affects household hygienic practices.

Who Should Care Most?

• • Indigenous community members, authorities, and elderly councils.

• • Indigenous organizations.

• • Public health, child welfare, and health care institutions at the local, regional, and national level.

• • Health care providers in the zone.

• • Municipal, state, and national policymakers in the areas of health, environment, and indigenous issues.

Recommendations for Action

• • It is necessary for communities to strengthen their child-rearing, food production, and nutritional practices in accordance with ancestral knowledge.

• • Institutional support is sought to support the implementation of indigenous communities' life plans as well as to adjust the institutional programs offered to communities in a way that they promote ancestral identity and cultural continuity.