Health promoting schools in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan has made a political commitment to make every school a Health Promoting School by 2025.

The efforts to achieve this goal have slowed down because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Most of the activities in schools were suspended due to moving school learning online and the focus of the health authorities have been on disease transmission prevention.

But after several months of break, the country decided to re-build capacity of national and regional coordinators to the Health Promoting Schools initiative. In May 2021, a national training on Health Promoting Schools in Kazakhstan were launched. It was lead by the WHO Kazakhstan Office and WHO Europe with the support from the Ministry of Health of Kazakhstan. 2-day training webinars were attended by over 200 participants. The participants included national coordinators from the Ministry of Health of Kazakhstan, regional coordinators from the health and the education sectors and school directors.

During the training, participants were introduced to the National adaption of the SHE School Manual v.2. Several practical exercises were introduced, using the SHE-tools, and the participants were building further action plans for their respective regions.