panama
Despite the opulence of Panama City and the breakneck speed with which the Panamanian economy has grown in the past few decades, the state of the communities we work with in the northwest of the country is heartbreaking. In the indigenous Ngöbe-Buglé reservation, 92% of people live below the poverty line and it has the highest infant mortality rate in all of Panama, nearly twice the national average.* Over 60% of residents of the Ngöbe-Buglé reservation do not have access to clean water. In one township where Solea Water has worked, 89.5% of residents did not have access to safe drinking water.**
*Censos Nacionales de Población y Vivienda 2000 **Ministry of Economy & Finance 2012
Many of our more recent projects are in the Darien region of Panama where 40% of the population live below the poverty line*. In the Embera-Wounaan reservation, over 70% of the population lives below the poverty line, and over 63% of the population lacks access to clean water.*
Our projects in Panama center around empowering indigenous communities to understand and take ownership over their water systems. We ask each community to contribute labor, a percentage of the project cost, and be responsible for filtration of the water at the household level.
*Ministry of Social Development of Panama 2018 Report
Panama Water Project Reports:
PROVING 100%. ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY, IMPACT.
Click on the thumbnails below to read the full project report for each of Solea Water's projects in Panama. They're also on our project map.
2021
2021 was a busy year for the Solea Water team in Panama’s Darien province. Our network continues to grow and now includes some 45 communities. We’ve also strengthened our relationships with the pertinent local institutions: the ministry of health, the municipality, the military police, and traditional indigenous authorities. Our growing team of regional water technicians worked to maintain dozens of water systems. We did improvements on a number of previously implemented water systems to keep up with growing communities and increasing the quality of water provided including in: Lajas Blancas, Nazareth, Nueva Esperanza, La Bonga, Ustupu.
We tackled two completely new water systems this year with the help of Rotary International, and they were arguably our best executions yet, delivering water to 111 homes. With support from the municipality, military police, and a lot of sweat equity put in by the communities, both systems were pumping crystal clear water within 6 weeks of beginning the infrastructure!
We completed 12 community assessments for future projects. This couldn’t have been accomplished without volunteer hours by engineering professionals from our partner organization Knox Pro Corps as well as dedicated interns and short term workers that joined us on the ground, working alongside the eager communities.
Despite complications and delays due to the pandemic, the team was also able to capitalize on a long-standing invitation to serve a new people group, the Guna of the San Blas islands, and will return to Ustupu in 2022 to support improvements of the water system on their most populated island, reported at over 5,000 people.
We were privileged to help host a vision trip that included professors from several disciplines at the University of Tennessee and a state representative, along with medical mission teams. This visit follows design work to support Solea Water projects by 4 student teams in the engineering and business fields at U of TN and their commitment to continuing partnership with our field team! We also have collaborations with University of St. Mary’s Texas and Iowa State University.
This vision trip was organized by our new partner organization, Prospera, which is dedicated to making and distributing recycled soap in Panama’s Darien region, generating local jobs and facilitating hygiene education in local public schools.
And to cap off a good year, in December we were awarded a grant to build water systems in 3 more new communities serving some 255 families!
