Hello, my name is Danielle, and I am currently living in Jinotepe,Nicaragua, and working at a school called CODESCO (The Cooperative of Social and Community Development) through the Foundation for Sustainable Development. CODESCO was founded in 2004 with the mission to socially support at risk children and adolescents in the hopes of keeping them off the street. By equipping them with strategies on survival through extreme poverty and teaching them vocational skills to overcome situations of risk, the students are trained and fully qualified for a job after completing the program. CODESCO also works with the children and adolescents to form values that contribute to their human development in a sustainable manner. The school offers workshops in carpentry, sewing and clothes production, bread making, pastry making, and artistry. Enrolled are 80 children between the ages of 14 and 18 and 40 children between the ages of 8 and 13 who are from the poorest neighborhoods in the Carazo region of Nicaragua.. The school recently launched "Pan del Campo", a bread making project that sells the product to residents of Jinotepe. This benefits both the community and CODESCO by helping sustain its efforts to teach and support the children. The center works with the families to assure that the youth are enrolled in school, and enables the families to stay informed of the rights of children and adolescents. With your help, we are trying to raise $1500 to reinforce the efforts of the school to increase bread sales, enhance community support, and better serve the youth at the center.

DESCRIPTION OF NEED

Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 48 percent of the population below the poverty line. The town of Jinotepe reflects the inherent needs of the country. A survey received by 25 students at the center showed that an average of 6.24 people live in each home, and of these people, only 1.68 have jobs. 20 of the participants in this survey indicated that the average monthly earnings for each household is 80 cordobas, or 2.69 dollars each day. To make matters even worse, the high rate of inflation in this country has diminished the ability to attain goods. Goods are more expensive, and the families are maintaining the same low income, making it more difficult for parents to provide food for their families.

CODESCO teaches technical abilities with the hope that the learned skills of the children and adolescents of the center will increase the economic success of the students. The goal population of children at CODESCO consists of children and adolescents that come from very poor families and work as unqualified workers just to help their family survive. The center works with the families to assure that the youth are enrolled in school (many of them were not enrolled before their intervention with CODESCO) and keeps them aware of the rights of children and adolescents. The problem of children working on the streets is especially large. Current estimates state that 161,000 children between 10 and 19 are employed in Nicaragua, while CENIDH (El Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos, or Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights) estimates that there are approximately 322,000 working children in the country. In addition, it is estimated that over 6,000 children work on city streets of Managua daily, selling merchandise, cleaning automobile windows, or begging. This is a problem that is clearly visible as one walks around the streets of any given city in Nicaragua. CODESCO works daily to make sure that the students at the center will no longer have to work on the streets, and that their families support this decision, and have the means to support their children.

Right now, CODESCO works in collaboration with the most impoverished sectors of the neighboring communities, parents of the children of the project, and other members of the community in the distribution and sale of bread that CODESCO produces. These workers sell the bread while walking without the assistance of any means of transportation due to the costs that occur. Throughout the beginning phases of the bread project, many people discontinued working for CODESCO due to the difficulty of walking long distances to pick up the bread and then sell the bread. Right now, CODESCO has only 6 walking vendors employed, but their flexibility is inconsistent due to the factors previously described. It would be very beneficial to the success and continuation of the bread making project if CODESCO could provide a mode of transportation for the families to sell the bread, allowing the bread to be accessible to those who need it. CODESCO is seeking to buy four bicycles that will be used for selling bread. In Nicaragua, one of the typical ways that businesses sell their food products is by means of vending bicycles. For example, Eskimo, an ice cream vending company in Nicaragua, hires their vendors to sell ice cream by means of vending bicycles, and their business is very successful because their product is accessible and very well advertised. Each bike has a large Eskimo logo on it with pictures of the ice cream that they sell. The vending bikes would allow the community of Jinotepe to have more access to the affordable and nutritional product that the CODESCO bakery produces while advertising the product for future sales and providing a trusting relationship between the customers of the community and the CODESCO vendors. Four families of the students of CODESCO will be selected and trained to sell the bread, and taught basic finance skills. This will strengthen the bakery project that has already been implemented at CODESCO. In turn, CODESCO will increase their sales of bread, and strengthen the bread making project that has already been implemented. The success of the project is dependent on a more efficient way of selling bread, and with the increased profits, CODESCO will be able to better support the other areas of vocational training within the school, and assist in the success of the bread making project.

WHAT YOUR DONATION CAN DO

The people of Nicargua live off of 2 dollars a day. Just a small donation can go a long way.

$20 dollars will provide school supplies for one year for one student

$50 dollars will provide one months worth of supplies for one vocational workshop

If you wish to give more to support the bread project, $250 dollars will buy one vending bicycle and support one family with a new job and a constant means of income. Either way, your donation, big or small, will make a great difference and will be used in the most sustainable way possible. Thank you!