Helping Rural Communities in Nicaragua to Flourish

I recently returned from visiting CEPAD Nicaragua, as the team at Amos Trust tentatively returns to travel following the pandemic. CEPAD are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. It was a fantastic time to visit, as I was able to attend one of their commemoration events marking this impressive milestone.

I visited all seven of the villages in Teustepe which Amos Trust is supporting in this five-year cycle. Joel, the manager of the Teustepe office, told me that these 7 villages were significantly drier than the communities they worked with in the previous cycle. Although there were still nearly three months to go until the rains were meant to come, in some villages we visited, the wells were already, or almost, dry.  El Bramadero for example, a community of three hundred people high up in the hills above Teustepe, is struggling with a serious lack of water. Their community well is already dry; the motorised pump they had installed recently burnt out because it was trying to pump water that wasn’t there.

Another community I visited was San Diego.

San Diego sits along the main road leading out of Teustepe town, and up a track into the dry hills. The houses are spread out; making access to water a challenge for those homes further away from the community well. They were badly hit by hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020; but thanks to CEPAD’s support, many community members received zinc sheeting to be able to rebuild their homes. 

“CEPAD is the only organisation who actually stopped and is working with us”, shared Johana, the leader of the CDC in San Diego. “Everyone else just drives by”. San Diego’s Community Development Committee is predominantly made up of women. Many members of the community have left for work in Costa Rica, or the USA - in the past this may have been for seasonal work but increasingly people are not returning. “The rain coming is our only hope as a community,” she continued. “We had such bad rains last year, it was like having three summers in a row. The warming climate is causing us so many problems."

The community are being trained in farming techniques by CEPAD, and have been helped with hoses and a pump to get water from the well to their plots. Doña Sonia is part of CEPAD’s family garden programme and has created a thriving plot close to her house. CEPAD provided fencing so that her chickens don’t destroy her young plants. She is currently carefully watering these by hand to save water, but the pump will be of help soon too.

She lives alone now; two of her three children have left Nicaragua to find better opportunities, as the harvests have failed twice in a row.  “It is a blessing to have land, and be able to grow your own food: to step outside and pick something. Life is hard especially with the drought, but when we have enough water it is so good for the body to grow our own food”.  

Another woman in San Diego helped by CEPAD is Doña Petrona, who is part of the entrepreneurship programme. She now sells homemade cornbread after receiving business training and a small grant. “Before the training I had no source of income like this; I just tried to farm my land and made cornbread for free. But now I have an income from my own business, and I sell cornbread in the surrounding villages and in Teustepe.”