Scannavino Neto Eugenio
Organization: Saúde e Alegría
Year Founded: 1985
Country: Brazil
Website: www.saudeealegria.org.br
Geographic Area of Impact: Brazil.
Model: Leveraged Non-Profit
Focus: Communication / Media,Education,Environment,Health,Rural Development,Water.
Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Brazil, 2005 Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum Video The Innovation Eugenio Scannavino and his brother Caetano Scannavino, created Saude e Alegria (SA), meaning “Health and Happiness", to reach isolated communities living along the Amazon River. The Health & Happiness Project (SA) has been working in the Amazon region since 1987 in extractivist communities along the Amazon, Tapajós and Arapiuns rivers, in the western rural areas of the municipalities of Santarém, Belterra and Aveiro, in the state of Pará. In 2003, the organization started to gradually expand the areas it works in to 150 localities, involving around 30,000 beneficiaries. The objective is to support participatory and integrated processes of comprehensive and sustained community development, managed by the population itself. Starting with the most pressing needs and the inputs of residents, Health and Happiness seeks out simple solutions adapted to the available resources in the communities themselves. It has an interdisciplinary team of doctors, agronomists and educators from a range of areas who regularly visit the communities to pursue Integrated Development through activities devoted to community organization, health, agro-forestry production and management, income generation, education, art and culture, gender, children and youth, popular communication and participatory research. It is a small touring circus that includes a radio, a TV and a newspaper entitled "Mocorongo", all of which are produced by the youth of the forest. The lessons learned also enable the construction of well-adapted and demonstrative social technologies of low cost and high impact quality. These systems can be implemented in different areas and contexts. Consequently, Health and Happiness has received ever increasing requests to advise other institutions, be it governmental or non-governmental, in or outside the Amazon region. The challenge now is to change the scale of work and universalize the successful experiences. Background The Amazon is the largest remaining tropical forest in the world, covering an area as large as Western Europe or the US. It is thought to be the most diverse ecosystem on Earth and is home to about 20 million people, including an estimated 180,000 indigenous people and many more than 5 million caboclos (traditional forest dwellers of indigenous and Portuguese ancestry). These people rely on this ancient forest for their way of life. However, the destruction of the Amazon has reached record levels, in 2004 with the annual rate reaching 26,130 square km, when President Lula’s Action Plan to Curb Deforestation had already been adopted. In 2007 this rate had already decreased more than 50%. During the same period, Lula’s government celebrated the rapid expansion in grain production and world leadership in soybean exports. Lula’s government faces a fundamental predicament: whether to fight Amazon deforestation or promote the expansion of agribusiness in order to pay the Brazilian external debt. To make a real difference, the government needs to restrict soy plantations to areas that are not still deforested, combat illegal logging, continue to create protected areas and effectively implement their own anti deforestation plan. Strategy Saude e Alegria’s strategy is based on community organization and self-governance underpinned by a respect for people and an unwavering belief in their innate capacity to contribute meaningfully to economic and social development. However, it takes time to get to the point where a community can chart its own destiny and monitor progress against commonly decided objectives. SA supports those communities eager to undertake such a process by providing training and accompaniment to the leadership, and working with them to cultivate citizenship and self-management. With each community, it develops a process of participatory diagnosis, monitoring and evaluation in multiple areas (primarily health and income generation), helps identify possible market-oriented activities, encourages the formation of cooperatives and aids in the identification of their markets. Further, SA educates the community in practices geared to preserve the environment, encourages inter-community exchanges and develops partnerships with the public and private sectors. The impact of SA’s activities on the health of the communities where it works is evident. The results have been outstanding: 100% of the families have sanitation, clean water, 98% children immunization, infant mortality has dropped dramatically to 18:1,000 in comparison to 48:1,000 in communities where SA has not been active. There has been a higher than average noticeable increase in improvements in education and training programs for the younger population. SA works within formal and non-formal education systems to stimulate learning, inquiry and problem solving. As a result of their activities, there is a significant difference between the literacy rate of SA communities and those without the organization’s involvement—illiteracy in the latter is 11.3% in comparison to 5.5% in SA communities. In the Popular Youth Network, youngsters and teenagers practice to be "Rural journalists" by writing in their own newspapers, radio and TV programs and cartoons. Until 2008 there have been 11 internet centers run by solar energy freeing these people living in the communities of the isolation and at the same time, by comparing themselves with the rest of the world, they notice and are proud of the place in which they live. It has contributed to the environmental, cultural and social preservation of these communities, with more than 1500 local agents in all different sectors Finally, SA’s work is having positive effects on the region as a whole. By working with individual communities to build leadership and self-determination, and by creating a communications network tying previously isolated villages together, a coalition of villages along the river was formed. After an exhaustive effort that involved over 300 community leaders, the Federation of Communities and their Organization of the Tapajós was founded and is now successfully arresting the advance of large agro-industrial companies that are trying to take over their land. With the law on their side, the federation has been able to ensure that the state and federal governments support their efforts. The Entrepreneur Eugenio Scannavino Neto is the son of Italian immigrants to Brazil. He graduated from medical school in São Paulo at the top of his class. His parents had high hopes that he would become the head of an important hospital in São Paulo. While completing his residency in Rio de Janeiro, however, he realized that little attention was ever given to a person’s healthy characteristics. Scannavino’s search for the roots of health led him to specialize in tropical medicine. In 1984,he was contracted by the municipality as a rural doctor to reach remote areas, and was assigned to an area in the Amazon. He knew that health in the Amazon was not a question of doctors and medicine; prevention was the key and it had to involve the communities themselves. Since Brazil was under dictatorial rule at the time, Scannavino’s efforts to organize communities around health aroused the suspicions of the authorities, who suspended his program. He spent the next year gathering a group of committed young professionals from various disciplines that wanted to work with him in the Amazon; the result was Saude e Alegria. His brother, Caetano, has worked with him since the beginning. Eugenio has been the recipient of many awards, including recognition as an Ashoka Fellow, World Citizen from Bahai International, and was named a “Pioneer of the 21st Century” by 2000 World Media.
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