Clean Water for Rural Honduras

EcoLogic Development Fund is proud to announce that the Yale University Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters (ISTF) has selected our local partner in northern Honduras, the Association of Water Councils of Pico Bonito National Park’s Southern Sector (AJAASSPIB in Spanish), as the winner of the 2015 ISTF Innovation Prize! The prize is for “outstanding initiatives in biodiversity conservation at the landscape level” and honors the collaborative effort between AJAASSPIB, EcoLogic, and the Municipality of Olanchito to use AJAASSPIB’s successful model of rural community-led conservation to an urban area.  

EcoLogic helped establish AJAASSPIB in 2006 as an association of water councils from rural villages near Honduras’s Pico Bonito National Park. AJAASSPIB’s work primarily focuses on ensuring local access to clean drinking water in a drought-prone area. Their main source of funding is an environmental fund of voluntary payments for water services made by community members who have learned about the connection between declining freshwater supply, deforestation and unsustainable agriculture. This has allowed AJAASSPIB to initiate a project to purify water by chlorination, and as a result, families can now drink clean water directly from their faucets—something that was unthinkable only a few years ago.

The joint project between AJASSPIB, EcoLogic, and the Municipality of Olanchito—a city of 40,000 people—is called the Agreement on Joint Environmental Management of the Municipality of Olanchito (MACO), and focuses on establishing an environmental fund similar to AJAASSPIB’s for the city. The agreement was signed in March 2011 after the Mayor of Olanchito’s office approached AJAASSPIB, seeking to leverage its experience on a larger scale—transferring rural innovation and know-how to an urban area.

EcoLogic’s Executive Director, Barbara Vallarino, says, “The fact that an urban municipality took the initiative in establishing a partnership with AJAASSPIB, a rural organization, testifies to the Association’s unique reputation in the region for honesty, technical rigor, and capacity to resolve conflict and build connections between disparate interests.”

Working closely with AJAASSPIB and EcoLogic under the MACO agreement, Olanchito is now establishing an environmental fund collected from residents to support locally-driven conservation of the 16,000-acre watershed that supplies water to the city’s inhabitants. As the MACO agreement demonstrates, AJAASSPIB’s community-powered, grassroots approach to conservation is a model for communities across Honduras and beyond!