Providing healthcare through inventions

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Andres Randazzo designed his SANUT (salud y nutricion, health and nutrition) products to solve systematic public health problems among impoverished populations in Mexico, particularly malnutrition. SANUT produces cisterns, ovens and even homes that are 70 percent cheaper than their counterparts and are an ideal model for the flexible design and use of appropriate eco-technologies. A 12,000 liter capacity cistern that took 10 days for specialized workers to install can now be installed by five local people in six hours. A local factory produces the molds which can be used to construct more than 100 final products. At their current stage of product development, houses will soon be built by local women in three weeks and cisterns—normally requiring significant heavy labor and time—can be built in 6 hours. 

Efforts of the Mexican Public Health Ministry and community organizations to educate poor communities on sanitation and other preventative health measures often fall short as they can not enable communities with the basic tools they need to integrate the lessons into daily life. Having identified the first key elements to a healthy household, Andres’ models for homes, ovens, cisterns and even fish farms are inexpensive, easy to use and assemble, and ecologically friendly. Designed and tested within the community, these eco-technologies are integrated with existing public health efforts of the Mexican government and community organizations that are working to improve public health in rural regions. Their pilot projects in six regions throughout Mexico have resulted in nearly 3,000 cisterns, ovens, houses and fish farms installed, impacting nearly 100,000 people.

A medical doctor by training from Argentina, when Andres Randazzo moved to Mexico, he began devoting himself to helping rural areas where meeting basic needs such as providing shelter for one’s family and finding access to clean water is a challenge. All of Andrés’ products are designed to foster low-cost community participation in household improvement and are made to be constructed easily by women, where as existing technologies relied only on men.  In 2001, SANUT won first prize in an award issued by the Mexican Health Foundation for the impact of its community development programs on children from zero to five years old. Now SANUT is recognized by national health organizations and community organizations as the missing ingredient to their preventative initiatives. Andres is already negotiating the expansion of SANUT’s new approach to five other countries in Latin America in order to incorporate SANUT’s appropriate technologies and constant community feedback into existing rural health networks.

Picture from Andres's document on his experience preventing malnutrition through SANUT (in Spanish).