FINANCIALS
We are grateful to all of our donors! We are a transparent organization and will provide more detailed financial information upon request. We are an efficient nonprofit; 82 cents of every dollar you give goes directly to our program work in Nicaragua.
FINANCIALS
We are grateful to all of our donors! We are a transparent organization and will provide more detailed financial information upon request. We are an efficient nonprofit; 82 cents of every dollar you give goes directly to our program work in Nicaragua.
OUR STORY
VISION
Empowering rural Nicaraguans to achieve better health through comprehensive clean water projects.
MISSION
Partner with rural Nicaraguans to develop and implement lasting projects and educational programs that increase access to clean water.
HOW WE WORK
El Porvenir does not initiate projects; staff members respond to requests for assistance from rural villages.
Village residents elect their own project committee, provide all labor on a volunteer basis, and take responsibility for the long-term maintenance of all projects. El Porvenir encourages the community to include women among the committee members.
El Porvenir provides technical expertise and training, lends tools, and funds the materials needed to complete the projects.
Community health education staff visits the projects periodically after their completion to ensure villagers know how to properly maintain their projects.
OUR HISTORY
Since 1990, El Porvenir has worked side-by-side with rural families and schools in Nicaragua to construct wells, latrines, village washing facilities, school hand-washing stations as well as support reforestation projects.
Carole Harper, a judge in California, founded El Porvenir in 1990 after serving as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in Nicaragua. She launched El Porvenir to address the lack of clean drinking water in rural communities and respond to the determination of local people to improve their living standards.
As El Porvenir developed, it grew into an integrated program that included water, sanitation, hygiene and maintenance education, and reforestation. When El Porvenir started offering work trips, Nicaragua was recovering from the aftermath of a civil war and didn’t have a tourism industry; it was difficult to find English-speaking guides, public transportation, or hotels outside of Managua. For North Americans to travel to Nicaragua and see El Porvenir’s rural development work first-hand, it was necessary for El Porvenir to serve as a tour organizer. Work trips bring small groups of North Americans into rural villages to experience village life and work alongside local families on projects.
What was once an organization with one employee, who carried out four projects a year, has become a leading international nonprofit with a mainly Nicaraguan staff partnering with thousands of Nicaraguans annually.
WHERE WE WORK
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere. In a country where 45% of rural people have no safe drinking water (UNICEF) and 47% of the forest cover has disappeared over the last 50 years (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), EP’s water, sanitation, and reforestation programs are a critical way to improve the living standards of the rural poor while conserving environmental resources. We work in remote, rural villages that lack access to the most basic services and are too small to receive assistance from other organizations. In general, communities are formed of subsistence farmers or day laborers who live in extreme poverty, surviving on $35-70/month. El Porvenir projects have been implemented in the 6 regions identified on the map.
