The Healthy Municipalities, Cities and Communities Movement (HMCC) has spread throughout the Americas for more than three decades, enabling the implementation of health promotion strategies at the local level, as well as strengthening health promotion in the Region.
"A Healthy Municipality is committed to improving health, well-being and equity through the implementation of healthy, intersectoral and participatory public policies. Each healthy municipality must be based on the values of the universal right to health, social justice, gender equality, solidarity, inclusion and sustainable development."
Background
Throughout the history of the Movement’s 30+ years, numerous meetings have held. Regular meetings of mayors and of the HMCC have been held since 2017 including:
I Meeting Acapulco, Mexico, 2017
II Meeting Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 2018
III Meeting Paipa, Colombia, 2019
IV Meeting (virtual), 2021
V Meeting Panama City, Panama, Panama, 2022
- During the V Meeting, mayors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, and Uruguay approved the Declaration of Panama.
- At this meeting, the Statutes were adopted, and the Movement's Executive Committee was formed, which will contribute to a greater sustainability.
- The regional criteria of HMCC were also adopted. The criteria consists of guidelines to design, implement and monitor policies towards the construction of healthy municipalities through the actions and indicators selected for each one of them.
> Regional criteria
The criteria proposal was developed in response to the need expressed by mayors at the III Meeting regarding a common criteria to move forward together in the region and to strengthen the HMCC. They have been built collectively through a consultative process involving both, institutional actors (mainly from local governments and Ministries of Health) and academics. The proposal takes into account the criteria of healthy municipalities already existing in the Region (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Dominican Republic as well as other WHO regions). The document has been enriched by the discussions held in the various meetings. A total of four consultations were held during 2021 with participants from 16 countries (15 from the region and Spain) and more than 30 mayors. The elaboration process also included a series of discussions with municipal and national teams from countries in the Region involved in the implementation of healthy municipalities and frequent technical exchanges have been held with the WHO group in charge of proposing global criteria. Discussions were also held at the IV Meeting of Mayors of Healthy Municipalities of the Americas (December 2021) where a preliminary version of this document was presented, and the inputs collected led to the preparation of this version of the adopted regional criteria.
Information coming soon.
Any municipality can be healthy if it commits to health, has a structure to work for it and starts a process to achieve more health and wellness for its entire population.
Local governments have a privileged role to play in promoting health:
- Due to their proximity and practical knowledge of the concrete needs and problems of the people who are born, grow, live, work and age in their territory.
- Because they have the authority (heterogeneous depending on the different countries of the Region) to intervene through policies in various sectors that contribute to improving the health of the entire population with equity and effectiveness.
- To be able to organize community participation in health promotion in a more operational and fluid manner.
The regional criteria seek to accompany the process of construction and consolidation of HMCC; and also to contribute to the strengthening of the Regional Movement of HMCC of the Americas.
The Ministries of Health have a key role in the promotion of the HMCC.
