Powerful solutions helping people in Honduras transform their lives and communities

I am just back from a trip to visit our CARE Honduras team, who continue to do amazing work in the face of 60% poverty rates. The challenges are particularly severe among women – they are less able than men to engage in paid work, less likely to have a bank account or own a home, and face one of the world’s highest rates of femicide. In some communities, migration has seemed like the only viable path to opportunity.

But the main takeaways of my trip were not the challenges, but the resilience and ingenuity of the micro-entrepreneurs and smallholder farmers I met. I sometimes worry that in bearing witness to suffering we can spread more despair than hope – so, in that spirit, here are a few

• We are gorgeous and we are strong. In partnership with 嘉吉 , CARE is training more than 1,000 women micro-entrepreneurs and helping them create savings groups to support one another and access additional capital.?CARE is also partnering with the municipality of Siguatepeque, whose mayor shared with me his commitment to replicate this type of model to reach 5,000-plus more micro-entrepreneurs. The mayor provides prime market space that helps these businesswomen expand their customer bases and creates a vibrant community atmosphere. From producers of fruit juice to delicious cranberry chocolates to colorful pottery, the women entrepreneurs I met beamed with pride and energy. One told me that she makes the most delicious bread in Honduras. She has gone from carrying her pan dulce and semitas in a basket, to a motorcycle, to a car, and she now has a truck to deliver her bread to customers around the region! With support from CARE, these entrepreneurs are now able to legally incorporate, access capital, sell online and to bulk purchasers. Worlds have opened up for them and for their families and children. As Julia Tróchez, who sells her crocheted baby clothes, flowers, and toys, said, “We are entrepreneurs AND mothers and we have little people to push forward in the world.” And Gladys Haylock, who is a painter, potter, and gardener as well as chair of the women’s entrepreneurship network, said, “You can’t imagine how BIG we feel through this work with CARE. WE are gorgeous and we are strong.”

• An Invitation to stay in our own country. Elias is a smallholder tilapia farmer who has painstakingly built his business and created the El Achiotal Aquaculture Association?with other farmers in this community to improve their capacity for action. Elias told me that Honduras could be the #1 tilapia exporter to the US with just some additional investment in smallholders like him. CARE has introduced our savings-group model to these farmers and brought technical assistance like aerators that are significantly increasing yields. When climate change and rising heat caused the loss of 90% of the tilapia in Elias’ farm, he readily embraced an innovation CARE presented to him – fish vaccinations. Despite some initial skepticism, the farmers’ association and CARE piloted this work and, over time, together, reduced the loss of tilapia to almost zero. One leader of the group shared that by working together, employing the best technologies, and accessing capital, she went from producing 12,000 pounds of fish a year to producing 72,000 pounds. With great hope, she told me, “We want our children to have this inheritance – this invitation to stay in their own community and country, but with opportunity.”
• The capacity to Dream. Sometimes simple innovations can be revolutionary. An afternoon with María Barahona, Nelo Porras, and their daughters Alexa and Nohelia was a compelling window into what a biodigester can do to change the quality of life of a family and community. María and Nelo showed us the miraculous changes this simple technology has brought to their life – they combined their pig manure and water into the biodigester and then demonstrated how it produced gallons of rich fertilizer that is nourishing their garden, providing gas for household cooking, reducing dangerous smoke inhalation for the family, and saving María 8 HOURS of daily collection of firewood. The biodigester is estimated to last 20-plus years and pays back its value within the first year. And on top of all that, each installed biodigester sequesters more than 10,000 tons of methane a year, can fuel cooking and power lights for more than eight hours, and completely eliminates the odor of the pigs! The CARE Honduras team is looking to partner this powerful solution to thousands more farmers in Honduras and, with a little bit of philanthropic seed capital, families can afford to purchase the technology directly. As María and Nelo told us, the biodigester provided many gifts, one of them was the ability to dream about how much more they could accomplish for their family and community.