School Vitamin Program
During the 2025 brigade Honduras Good Works carried out a nutritional evaluation in the communities of Sabana Redonda, Agua Viva, Los Lainez, El Cordoncillo and Villa de San Francisco. Beyond identifying the double burden of malnutrition, the assessment paints a deeper picture of how chronic nutrient deficiencies impact growth, learning and long-term health in the communities that we serve year by year.
Across all communities many children, especially those under five, were underweight, had stunting or actual wasting, clear indicators of long-term nutrient deprivation. Others were overweight or obese, a sign of diets high in calories but poor in essential nutrients.
Sabana Redonda displayed the most severe nutritional challenges with multiple cases of children falling into the “severe underweight”, “stunting “and “high vulnerability” categories. All the other communities also showed high number of children at risk for underweight or stunting and many were classified as ¨healthy but keep monitoring¨ indicating fragile health and borderline nutrition.
Why the vitamins provided by HGW are essential
Honduras remains one of the Central American countries with the highest rates of childhood malnutrition, shaped by persistent poverty, low household dietary diversity and limited access to nutrient rich foods. Deficiencies occur in critical nutrients such as iron which is the leading cause of anemia and can impair learning and behavior, vitamin A which increases vulnerability to respiratory and diarrheal infections, complex B vitamins which disrupts neurological development, as well as other essential nutrients. This phenomenon is known as Hidden Hunger, a type of malnutrition that silently weakens immunity, generates learning difficulties and leads to development delays.
The vitamins provided by HGW directly address these needs. For many families who can’t access fortified foods or dietary diversity these multivitamins become one of the few reliable sources of nutrients. Without ongoing intervention, these children are at a very high risk of slipping into malnutrition. This is a joint effort between those in the US and local Honduran workers. Currently HGW budgets $15,000 annually to provide a daily multi-vitamin with iron to over 2000 elementary students each day they are in school. The vitamins are delivered to 40 schools monthly by a local Honduran man, who also keeps records of the number of children benefiting. They are administered to the students daily by their teachers, who have been taught to understand that these flavored chewable vitamins contain iron and must be kept out of reach of the children to prevent accidental iron overdoses. We are very grateful to our donors who help maintain this program!