Boomerang effect in health promotion international cooperation: A register of the direct benefits in the “cooperator” country

The international cooperation project Japan-Brazil: “Healthy Municipalities in the Brazilian’s Northeast” had as its main objective to develop articulation mechanisms between the civil society and the local management based on the intersectoriality, in the social participation and in the healthy public policies promotion as a construction process for Healthy Municipalities in one of the poorest regions of Brazil. Since December 2003 a group of Brazilians and Japanese researchers dedicated themselves to construct, in a joint effort with the local population, a structure based in three levels (micro, meso and macro) and in the continuous integration of the research, formation, practice and the development of healthy public policies. Japanese connoisseurs participated in the project with researchers of Pernambuco. The model developed was conceived based on the local peculiarities reality.
The center axis based on three interdependent levels and the articulation with the planning and management sectors of the government (and not with the health sector directly) guaranteed the intersectoriality. Prior similar projects evaluations developed by the Brazilian group guided the construction of the articulation and execution model integrating research, formation and public policies.
This structure was immediately adopted in Japan as well, in the city of Shiroi, supported by the Juntendo University.
Therefore, we saw that there was an important contribution by the Brazilian side, mainly with the inclusion of the politic perspective and the articulation link between individual and social macro-determining levels.   The Project was considered successful and was recommended to cooperate in the condition of third party between lusophonic Africa and Latin America countries. Despite all of that, it was demonstrated in the evaluation mission that there are a lot of difficulties to register the direct effect generated in Japan by the cooperated country “trainees”.