3. Construction of vented, fuel-efficient stoves that use 60% less firewood than typical cook stoves to reduce deforestation and improve health.

4. Coordination with local government and other organizations to increase impact.

5. Educating residents on the economic and environmental benefits of climate change mitigation and watershed restoration through community workshops.

6. Creation of a model watershed that uses all of the above practices to show people from other communities how their watershed could flourish.

7. Training residents to create local community management committees who manage and maintain systems and programs. The training and education of residents to promote behavioral change is a pivotal part of conservation, restoration, and protection.

​

Crucial components for success:

• Willingness of the community to create a vision and work together to achieve it.

• Incentives like tools and boots for community members to encourage participation.

• Buy-in from landowners with the most strategically important lands.

​

El Porvenir promotes creating a culture of conservation. Forests are reservoirs of biodiversity: critical refuges for species with numerous ecosystems that provide carbon-storage to buffer the effects of climate change. Our work educates residents and involves them in watershed restoration to promote plant and animal diversity in a way that creates a better standard of living. Making these changes now will reduce the impact of extreme weather events in the future; for example, a community with forested hillsides is much less likely to have a devastating mudslide than a deforested community. We are working with communities on risk management: building systems to resist negative impacts of heavy rain, no rain, and other weather occurrences.

​

Food security, especially in Nicaragua where subsistence agriculture is common, is at risk due to less stable growing conditions. Agricultural practices must adapt to warmer temperatures, reduced precipitation, less secure water supply, more extreme weather events, and more aggressive plant diseases and pests. To improve water supply and food security for future generations, we will continue to restore upland watersheds and work with villagers to implement sustainable management practices that build on traditional economic activities (agriculture and livestock) while making those practices more sustainable.

​

All of our projects (water, sanitation, hygiene education, and watershed restoration) begin at the community level with rural Nicaraguans asking us to work with them. The people most interested in this program are those who are noticing the effects of poor agricultural practices and climate change on their crops. Our rural partners have lived in these areas for generations; they know that weather patterns are changing, temperatures are going up, and water is becoming scarcer. What they don’t know is how to reverse the effects of generations of poor land management and climate change. But they want to learn. El Porvenir’s watershed program provides a critical bridge between rural communities in Nicaragua and their future sustainability.

​

You can support El Porvenir’s work by making a donation at elporvenir.org/donate.

​

EL PORVENIR

Organizational History and Evolution: El Porvenir: Clean Water, Healthy Nicaraguans was founded in 1990 as a partner to Habitat for Humanity’s self-help housing programs that then did not include water and bathroom facilities. What began as a response to an urgent need for clean water perceived in one Habitat for Humanity project village has grown to an organization that supports self-help, community-driven water, sanitation, hygiene education, and watershed restoration projects in 6 regions made up of hundreds of villages. El Porvenir’s methodology is based on three key principles: (a) community empowerment through active participation and ownership in all aspects of the project, (b) creation of organizations in the community to manage resources in the long term, and (c) focus on appropriate technology made from low-cost locally available materials that can be easily maintained by the community. As of December 2018, El Porvenir has partnered with over 185,000 rural Nicaraguans to build 1,350 water and sanitation projects, plant over 1,200,000 trees, construct 1,800 fuel-efficient stoves, and educate all community partners on health and environmental issues.

​

Mission: Partner with rural Nicaraguans to develop and implement lasting projects and educational programs that increase access to clean water.

​

​

[1]  Nicaraguan colonization: Nicaragua is made up of sixteen departments (western Nicaragua) and two autonomous regions (eastern Nicaragua); there is tension between the two sides. The autonomous regions are sovereign territories with little transportation or communication infrastructure, minimal social and economic investment, and low coverage of basic services. Waslala is located in the northern autonomous region. Though the autonomous regions have sovereignty, non-indigenous people from western Nicaragua have been settling, oftentimes illegally, in the autonomous regions. When speaking of colonization, we are not referring to the Spanish or British colonization of Nicaragua, but rather colonization that is ongoing today.

​