Ferreñafe Agro-Sanitation Zone Oro Verde, like Shobuj Shona, is translated “Green Gold” –a clear reference to a duckweed crop’ s intense verdant appearance and to its significant market potential. PRISM was recently granted legal rights to “Oro Verde” as a tradename for agricultural products in Peru.Ferreñafe is a farming community of approximately 60,000 on Peru’s northern coastal desert, situated near the city of Chiclayo about 200 miles south of the border with Ecuador.

In 1991, Ferreñafe began to treat its wastewater using two oxidation ponds. This 3-hectare system replaced a trickling filter system that has been out of operation for over twenty years. However, neither the regional water authority nor the provincial government has the resources to operate and maintain these oxidation ponds or their associated pumping station. The ponds have, therefore, been abandoned almost from their inception and all wastewater now passes directly to the nearby ocean as untreated sewage to contaminate the beaches, just as it has for the past twenty years.

Of course, a great deal of the wastewater is illegally diverted for irrigation by farmers who own land adjoining the sewage canal. The ongoing cholera epidemic has done little to inhibit use of wastewater for irrigation of local vegetable truck farms.

The Oro Verde project in Ferreñafe is designed to treat the wastewater of the community of Ferreñafe, Peru, while also growing a valuable crop of Lemnaceae. The project will benefit the entire community by decreasing the local risk of enteric infection – particularly cholera – and increasing the local availability of edible protein. Structured as a producer-owned profit-making enterprise, the project will significantly increase the income of the poor agricultural workers who make up the Producers Association.

Preliminary work on this project, financed by the Canadian Office of Forestry Development in Peru, was completed in 1991. This included studies on the growth characteristics of native species of Lemnaceae in experimental ponds, the response to high levels of dissolved salts in the water, and the nutritional value of one species, Lemna gibba, given as part of a balanced feed to chickens. This preliminary project ended successfully in December with results that were promising enough to secure commitments to fund the first phase of construction, a 10-hectare agro-sanitation zone to be in operation by the end of 1992.

The Ferreñafe Agro-Sanitation Zone moved into its first phase of construction in March, 1992, breaking ground on 3 hectares of Lemnaceae lagoons. This was accompanied by the complete redesign and construction of a more efficient harvester, the construction of solar dryers, the creation of a 16-member Producers Association (half of whom are women), and the installation of a water quality laboratory .By the end of 1992, this enterprise should be capable of producing annually over 240 tons of Lemnaceae meal worth over $60,000.

As this report is being published, the Producers Association has started construction on the final 7 hectares of land planned for completion in 1992. It is also completing the engineering needed to guarantee the capture of all of Ferreñafe’s wastewater once the 10-hectare site is ready for full operation.x

HISMIS Project

The HISMIS Project –the “Health Information System/Management Information System for the Ministry of Health of Peru” -is PRISM’s most ambitious project to date. Undertaken in 1990 for three years at a total cost of $4.5 million, the HISMIS Project aims to support over 600 public sector health centers throughout Peru with a complete computer-based information system. This system handles administrative matters such as personnel and inventory at 28 regional centers scattered around the country .

More importantly, it collects key information on every patient visit and produces a wide range of epidemiological reports to assist health providers in planning how to deliver better services to more people at lower cost.

The HISMIS System went into full implementation during 1991 with a network of 10 regional computer management advisors from PRISM. These advisors worked with the informatics units of 28 regional and sub-regional offices of the Ministry of Health to install hardware and software, train personnel, and re-organize their operations. Meanwhile, training teams -specialists in either the HIS or MIS components -criss-crossed Peru giving training sessions to health center personnel who, finally, will bear primary responsibility for data collection.

By the time 1991 ended, all 28 planned computer centers were in operation and all but a few of the most remote or difficult areas of Peru had been reached by the training program. A number of unavoidable holdups in USAID financing, due to unresolved problems of debt repayment between Peru and the United States, seriously interfered with the smooth implementation of the HISMIS Project. Nevertheless, the project team adapted each time, reprogramming their efforts to meet the realities of each situation as best they could, and finished the year virtually on-schedule in HIS and well-advanced in MIS.

The HISMIS Project had just entered its last phase to strengthen the support systems for the national health information system, when events in Peru indefinitely paralyzed further effort. The presidential coup d’etat, which suspended Peru’s constitution and dissolved the legislative and judicial branches, led to an immediate suspension of all U.S. aid with the exception of food and some activities in the non-profit private sector.

As of April, all but four of the HISMIS team members were placed on indefinite layoff to wait out the political crisis. While there is little hope that funding can be resumed before 1993, PRISM has done everything possible to consolidate the gains that the project has made thus far and, with a small emergency fund authorized by USAID, is turning over all remaining equipment and supplies to the Ministry of Health in an orderly and technically acceptable manner.

Meanwhile, PRISM’s network of regional computer management advisors has been contracted directly by the Ministry to continue to provide service support during this difficult period. While this crisis has not been pleasant for PRISM staff in Peru, everyone takes a certain measure of pride in the extent to which the people in the Ministry -for whom the system is intended – have moved to take up the slack to keep running the system that we together have built. 

INFORMATION –BASED MANAGEMENTThe HISMIS and Community Health Centers projects mentioned in this report fall within the framework of Information-based Management. Among PRISM projects From previous years, a quality management project with the Ministry of Health -which we called CYMOS:  Spanish for “In-service Monitoring and Training” -remains at the core of our designs for future projects. The concepts of information-based management are powerful but theoretical and abstract. We intend to capture them with practical examples from over five years of experience in a professional book on the subject which we hope to publish in 1993. The title planned for this book is “Information-based Management, Equity and Efficiency.”

It is even more importan4however, that we give these concepts concrete form in organizations that make a difference to the people we seek to serve. HISMIS will do this when it is again financed in 1993 after Peru’s government begins to restore democracy to this country and U.S. economic sanctions are lifted.