Context

The Capitanata area, in the north of Puglia, includes the province of Foggia, the third largest in Italy. In this area, poverty levels are below the average of southern regions. Agriculture plays a major role in the economy of this area, where 50% of Italian tomatoes come from. Capitanata hosts around 10 informal settlements within a 55 km radius of Foggia, with an estimated number of workers for these settlements ranging from 2,000 during the winter to 6,500 during the summer, when the tomato harvest takes place. These are abandoned buildings, cottages, shantytowns, which make up the so-called ghettos, with extremely precarious sanitary conditions. These settlements, which have existed in the area for more than 20 years, are the result of the logic of labour exploitation and the failure to regularise the status of workers who have often been in the country for years and are not given any labour protection.

Activities

Since 2018, INTERSOS has been carrying out, in the Capitanata area, assistance and health education activities to support vulnerable people, mainly migrant seasonal agricultural workers, who find themselves, temporarily or permanently, outside the reception systems and social-health protection mechanisms. Over the years, INTERSOS has provided primary medical care with two mobile units, health orientation services and accompaniments of highly vulnerable patients, as well as health promotion sessions.

Since 2019, thanks to a memorandum of understanding with the ASL of Foggia, a training course has been structured and linguistic-cultural mediators and mediators have been included in the project, who are fundamental in carrying out work aimed at facilitating access to health services for foreigners.

Between 2020 and 2021, our socio-health teams also carried out an awareness-raising and advocacy project to facilitate access to the vaccination campaign against COVID-19 and the obtaining of the green pass for inhabitants of informal settlements.

Our intervention in 2023

Between January and December 2023, we reached 1,148 people, including 732 new users. Overall, there were 2,732 accesses to our activities. Additionally, we continued to implement outreach and health prevention interventions through the “SuPrEme” and “PIU SuPrEme” projects, funded respectively by the European Commission and the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. These projects are part of the Three-Year Plan to combat labor exploitation in agriculture and caporalato, with support from the Puglia Region and the Regional Agency for Social and Health Services of Puglia (ARESS).