FOCUS
Promoting Health and Fighting Disease    

MDGs ADDRESSED
MDG 4: Reduce child mortality
MDG 5: Improve maternal health
MDG 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
MDG 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
MDG 8: Create a global partnership for development

OVERVIEW
After enduring more than a decade of civil war, Nicaragua was struck by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which caused billions of dollars of damage to property and the infrastructure. Today, an estimated one-half the population is under-employed and living in poverty.

More than half of the country’s rural population, and 90% of the urban population do not have access to clean drinking water. The water supply is often untreated and is further contaminated by the lack of working sewage systems. As a result, diarrhea and gastroenteritis are leading causes of death among children one to four years old.

Our PARTNER
Episcopal Relief and Development’s partner in Nicaragua is El Provenir, a U.S. based non-profit organization that works to improve the standard of living of poor people through sustainable self-help water, sanitation and reforestation projects. El Provenir’s method of working at the grassroots level complements Episcopal Relief and Development’s commitment to strengthening local parishes and dioceses to carry out development programs to benefit the larger community.

Our CURRENT PROGRAMS
Episcopal Relief and Development is working to improve the quality of life for Nicaraguan families and children by providing health education, appropriate sanitation systems, and access to clean water. These improvements not only reduce the incidence of preventable disease, but will also lessen the physical burden of carrying water from its source, a job that typically falls to women and children.

Episcopal Relief and Development is also protecting and sustaining the environment through reforestation projects to restore a century’s worth of deforestation from both foreign logging operations and the use of firewood for cooking. Drought is a consequence of deforestation, which in turn causes food shortages. The massive devastation by Hurricane Mitch was due to the lack of trees and the inability of the earth to absorb the water.

Promoting Health and Fighting Disease
Episcopal Relief and Development is ensuring that communities have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, along with the training they need to maintain these systems on their own. Health educators track incidence of water-borne disease and monitor whether the systems are being used properly, to see where additional education and behavior-change reinforcement is needed.

• Sanitary wells, covered with a concrete lid (fitted with a low technology rope pump) ensure families have clean water year-round in their own villages.
• Household latrines provide adequate sanitation for families to prevent disease.
• Smokeless cook stoves that use less wood and are vented outside the home prevent respiratory illnesses.
• Trained health promoters instruct community members in basic disease prevention, hygiene and sanitation practice reduces respiratory, water-borne, mosquito-borne and parasitic illnesses.

Alleviating Hunger
Episcopal Relief and Development is improving the food supply in rural areas through reforestation projects that protect the watershed areas, replenish the soil and increase its fertility.

• Training and support gives residents the skills to establish community nurseries to grow seedlings. The seedlings, when grown, are planted in the watersheds to reduce erosion and enrich the soil.

Our PAST ACHIEVEMENTS
Through Episcopal Relief and Development’s on-going partnership with El Provenir (since 2006), approximately 10,000 Nicaraguans in 30 communities have benefited from clean water, adequate sanitation, and community health education.

• 150 latrines were constructed.
• Five hand-dug wells are completed or in process.
• One washing and bathing station was built.
• 40 tree nurseries were planted.