We received word on December 2nd that the Global Grant for the Gorongosa Mobile Medical Services Expansion GG#1530732 has been approved.   This initiative has raised the funds necessary to purchase a Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4 vehicle to transport trained medical staff to remote communities of the areas surrounding Gorongosa National Park.  These medical staffs provide an array of services - Mobile Health Brigades vaccinate and examine and treat patients having no other medical service, Model Moms and Traditional Birth Attendants provide pre and neo-natal care, Community Health Workers reside in their communities and educate the population on preventative health practices and techniques.  The purchase of the vehicle will extend these existing services to communities not currently served.  Additionally, any funds left over from he purchase of the vehicle will be applied toward the training of additional medical staff.  If you would like to learn more about these programs I would recommend you take a look at the description of these programs at http://www.gorongosa.org/our-story/community/health.

The Semilla Nueva Global Grant has been going really well. 20 families just successfully harvested rice, netting $94 on average worth of rice to eat and sell. The new high protein corn seed has been going even better. 2,916 families got seed in 2016, and over 500 have used a new Semilla Nueva methodology to save seed in plastic bottles to save them from buying seed the following year. Many other families are saving seed in more traditional ways. We're proud that over 27,000 people should be eating a more nutritious diet everyday thanks to the work that we did with the Global Grant. in 2017, we want to make that number grow even higher and we are already producing seed.