“Health promotion is an organized way of going about improving the health of a population. It is based on the assumption that through improving the health of the population, the health of individuals within the population will benefit.”

An important aspect of health promotion is enabling people to have greater control over their health. Health promotion not only involves the prevention of disease, but it also seeks to go beyond this. It creates an appreciation of the importance of health as an end in itself.

After the launch of the VHAI Health Promotion Programme in March 2006, work started in the first phase in 5 states – Kerala, Orissa, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal. The teams selected rural and urban schools within their project areas and health promotion activities comprised awareness campaigns workshops, quiz sessions, parent-teacher interactions, health corners, health diaries, sports events and inviting local celebrities as resource persons. The VHAI health promotion team at Delhi and the state teams in different settings are also working to develop different types of IEC materials like books, periodicals, posters, traditional games, questionnaires, and information dossiers on health promotion.

In the first week of April 2007, VHAI organized a capacity-building workshop for state partners, titled, “Building Health Promoting Schools and Communities” in Orissa. The agenda of the meeting was to orient some participants on the innovative programmes being executed by the Orissa team, and give them an exposure to other state participants in order to enable them to improvise their programmes and share their views, experiences and challenges. The Sikkim VHA team also joined this orientation workshop with the aim of launching a similar health promotion programme.