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

Project Reports:

ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY, IMPACT.

Click on the photos below to read about our work in each of these incredible communities to work with in Panama. You can also find them on our project map.

communities