Water Sanitation Hygiene Venezuela

As of March 2022, access to safe drinking water remains a major challenge for millions of people in Venezuela. According to HumVenezuela, more than 19 million Venezuelans did not have a regular water supply, while over 4 million lacked access to safe water. However, thanks to your support, over the past few months we have been able to make a positive impact on the lives of thousands of Venezuelans.

During the last trimester of 2022, we partnered with seven organizations in nine different states of Venezuela, distributing 20 community filters and 11 tanks, and benefitting more than 4,500 Venezuelans. The provision of these filters and tanks has significantly increased access to safe drinking water, while reducing the time and effort required to collect water. As a result, these programs are now able to operate more efficiently and build capacity.

The beneficiaries of this donation include community kitchens, nutritional recovery centers, public schools, and community centers. The tanks and filters have proved crucial to these programs, enabling children to attend school and receive a nutritious meal, while ensuring the safe preparation of food.

Our goal is to expand the distribution of filters and tanks to more communities in Venezuela, so we can continue to increase the capacity of these much-needed programs. With your continued support, we can make this a reality and positively impact the lives of even more children.

Thank you for your generosity and commitment to helping the children of Venezuela. Together, we can create sustainable solutions that improve access to safe drinking water and enhance the overall quality of life for vulnerable communities.

For the last three years we have been supplying schools, nutritional recovery programmes and community centres with WASH infrastructure, helping them to improve their operations and provide better services. Providing WASH infrastructure and resources to these important programmes builds their capacity, enabling them to continue and grow - and ultimately provide much-needed support to the children in Venezuela.

Today, we want to share some of the testimonials we've received recently to give you an insight into the impact of our WASH programme - and why your support is so important to many in Venezuela.

From our partner Meals4Hope - who run a community centre (providing nutritional support, amongst other services, to children) in rural Venezuela:

"Chamos' support for this and other communities has been very relevant, especially in water issues. Having clean and safe water is very important for hygiene, nutrition and all life functions. The children know that Chamos provides them with clean water, and they come asking for 'Chamos water'!"

From a partner that run a community centre on the edge of Petare, one of the biggest slums in Latin America:

“Once a boy asked us for water and we gave him water from the filter Chamos gave us, and the boy said, in the midst of his innocence, that the water in the church was tastier than the one in his house.”

From one of our partner schools in La Vega (a poor area of Caracas) where 300 children attend daily:

"Our greatest testimony is that since in person classes began, it had not been possible to summon 100% of the students due to lack of water and thanks to the tanks, today all the children enrolled in the school attend."

I hope these testimonials go some way towards illustrating the true impact that your donation is having on children across the country. 

If this email has inspired you to do more to support Chamos - look no further! #GivingTuesday2022 is just around the corner (November 29th), and this year GlobalGiving are offering $1.2 million of incentive funds - so the more Chamos raises, the more additional funds we receive. This year, we are aiming high: with the mission of raising $60,000 for projects to bridge the education gap in Venezuela. We'd love you to join us in making this our biggest Giving Tuesday ever!

Water shortages continue to affect many in Venezuela, and when accessible water is often not potable. 

Sourcing potable water is a struggle for many in Venezuela, and many of the programmes we support suffer from inefficiencies, are sometimes delayed, and even interrupted due to lack of water.

Since 2019 we have been trying to mitigate this problem through our WASH programme, and we continue to expand it helping more children thanks to your generous support.

Three years into our WASH Programme, during the months of May and June, we conducted a follow up WASH survey in order to see the impact that our donations had, and measure the success of the programme.

One strong theme we have noticed in the feedback we’ve received is that of increased dignity, wellbeing, and health for our partners’ beneficiaries: health issues have reduced; children are drinking more clean water because it tastes better; community members are approaching our partners for water because they know it is safe. 

Another particularly exciting learning is that our impact metrics indicate that our WASH donations are increasing the capacity of our partners to carry out their programmes. Partners report reducing the time they spend - on both water collection and purification - giving them more time to dedicate to their projects, as well as being able to increase the reach of their operations - for example, increasing the number of beneficiaries or opening their centre more regularly. 

Our programme is helping our partners to do what they do better, more effectively, and more efficiently - and as such will have a long-term, sustainable impact far beyond the initial resource donation.

 -  58% - partner centres reported having increased the reach of their operations as a result of our WASH         infrastructure donations

- 48% [before WASH] // 9% [after WASH] - partner centres reported having to boil water to purify it

- 74% [before WASH] // 13% [after WASH] - partner centres reported spending over 1 hour a day on the process of water purification

We could not be happier with the results of our wonderful WASH initiative that has help many partners and children in Venezuela. We are super motivated to keep this great work and expand this project to many more! 

With the donations of GlobalGiving from the past 3 months, we bought 2 community filters in April. The arrived safely in Caracas and have now reached their permanent homes.

One is in Yaracuy in a Nursery and Primary School in la Marroquina and will be the source of clean water for 250 children who attend the school daily.

The second one will go to the Primary school of Escuela San Onofre in Catia, Caracas who serves 280 children daily.

Thank you for your continuous support that has been pivotal on the success of our WASH programme.

Best Wishes,

Mariana Siblesz de Alvarez

We continue to deploy our WASH infrastructure programme in Venezuela, thanks to your generous donations.

Water shortages continue to affect many in Venezuela, and when accessible water is often not potable.

With the donation of water tanks and filters we mitigate this problem, by allowing our partners to safely store water to run their programmes continuously, and to potabilise the water they use for cooking and drinking in order to reduce water borne transmissible diseases.

During the last months we have bought 2 cylinder 500L water tanks for the Escuela Niño Jesus de Praga, a school in La Vega Caracas that  attends 200 primary school children.

Since January the school has been suffering from an irregular water supply which has put the school operation in jeopardy,  forcing them to reduce their teaching schedule to only 2 days a week.

We hope that thanks to the addition of this two water tanks they will be able to resume their normal school schedule and run their school programme 5 days a week.

This is all possible thanks to your generous donations.

A lot has happened in Venezuela since we wrote our last report, the covid pandemic peaked and reached its highest infection levels in September, cases have been at similar levels since then, but there has been a relaxation of lockdown rules. 

Schools have begun in presential mode since October, bringing joy and much needed education and recreation to many children.

Thanks to your continuous support and generous donations we were able to supply surgical masks and hand sanitizer gel to 2 of our local partners: Sowi in El Escobal Edo. Lara and Degania in Soledad Edo. Anzoátegui.

These 2 very important items of Personal Protective Equipment have allowed our partners to safely continue to run their much-needed programmes from September to December helping 800 kids and 50 adults.

With your amazing support we have also managed to expand our WASH programme by adding ASEAM as another one of our WASH programme beneficiaries. We have bought community water filters for 6 of their centres. One of them is already in place and the other 5, will arrive in January will allowing 2,300 adults and 2,200 children to have clean potable water for the next 5 years.

Our goal is to keep expanding our WASH programme and bring clean drinking WATER- This invaluable resource- To many more children across Venezuela.

       Thank you for trusting us to make our goals a reality!

                          The Chamos Team.