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ProNica projectsOver the years ProNica partnerships in Nicaragua have been forged with several community-based grassroots organizations in poor urban barrios and rural areas. These projects provide services arising out of local needs in health, education and agriculture. 2008 GRANT AWARDSProNica project partners submit grant proposals each fall. ProNica Nicaraguan consejo, or advisory committee, reviews all proposals and makes recommendations. The stateside projects sub-committee reviews translated proposals, consejo recommendations and sends their recommendations to the full committee. In December the full committee decides grant awards which are disbursed in January from donated funds. This year ProNica awarded grants totaling $21,494.
HEALTHIn the poorest urban barrios and rural areas of Nicaragua, up to 80 percent of the households are headed by women who may have become mothers as early as age 14 or younger. Pregnancies often continue throughout their childbearing years. With little or no education, training or employment opportunities, many mothers scavenge in dumps, send their children to beg on the streets or resort to prostitution. Many women and children go hungry. ProNica supports several projects that address these problems. The Acahualinca Women’s Center in Managua focuses on women’s reproductive health by providing consultation and treatment, pap smears, education on cervical and uterine cancer and outreach to sex workers. Casa Materna in Matagalpa cares for rural women with high-risk pregnancies by providing pre- and post-natal medical care, education and tubal ligations. Casa de los Niños in San Ramon provides natural medicines and education. Mama Licha’s Clinic in Esteli provides midwife services to poor women. Los Quinchos is a multifaceted rehabilitation program for glue-sniffing street children with an intake house in Managua and residences and workshops in San Marcos and Granada. ProNica also supports a natural medicine clinic in Achuapa and a health clinic in remote Mulukukú. In Limay, ProNica has purchased hundreds of ceramic water filters to reduce disease from waterborne parasites, the leading cause of death in infants and young children. EDUCATION
ProNica supplies funds for libraries to stock current textbooks and other materials. These libraries provide a safe learning environment outside of school and offer cultural enrichment. ProNica supports urban libraries in three poor barrios of Managua; Acahualinca, Martin Luther King and Edgar Lang. We also support municipal libraries in Estelí and Achuapa, and a small library associated with Los Quinchos. Due in large part to ProNica support, the Estelí library is considered one of the best in Nicaragua. AGRICULTURE
The Tienda is a cooperative offering agricultural extension agents, credit, a small store, and a model farm. It also buys and processes the local sesame crop for sale abroad. Supported by ProNica and the Canadian Friends Service Committee, the coop is engaged in an ambitious 13-year project to convert sesame and other crops to organic production, with goals of ending farmers’ reliance on costly, harmful fertilizers and pesticides, and fetching higher market prices. The program has 75 participating farmers. Women in highlands villages grow herbs for local markets and export, particularly hibiscus. ASODEPA is a project focusing on clinical veterinarian work. It includes a pharmacy, training in livestock production and animal health, and selling feed and improved chicken stocks at affordable prices. ProNica assisted a series of training programs for women in poultry production. Attendance for these programs was 100 percent and poultry production has increased as the women have learned how to make improved feeds, identify diseases and vaccinate their stock. SERVICEProNica provides opportunities for individuals to volunteer in Nicaragua to bring help and hope to the lives of the people served by our project partners. Volunteers typically work in-country for six months or more, and live with families in the communities they serve. Visit our Volunteers section for more information. ProNica also offers a ten-day Friends Witness Tour, a small group tour where participants visit the community-based projects that ProNica supports and meet those who are working on the “front lines” every day. |
ProjectsSee ProNica in action
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Nearly one million Nicaraguan children do not attend school. Most of these children come from large families who can scarcely feed and clothe them, let alone pay for tuition, uniforms and textbooks. Even with the newly elected government’s promise to support free, public education and health care, former structural adjustment policies that ensured a lack of government support, particularly in small towns and poor neighborhoods, will be difficult to overcome. Most classrooms and students lack textbooks, therefore textbooks in local libraries provide valuable resources for learning.
In the small rural community of Achuapa, ProNica helps support two organizations that work with poor farmers; the Cooperative Juan Francisco Paz Silva, better known to locals as the Tienda Campesina, and ASODEPA, the Association for Agricultural Development in Achuapa.