Oscar Leiva/Silverlight for CRS
El Salvador
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166K+
Participant services delivered
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6.6M+
Population
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21K
Sq km area
CRS in El Salvador
El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. With a population of just over 6 million, it is also considered the most industrialized country in Central America. However, its people continue to face serious challenges.
An estimated 1 in 5 El Salvadorans have emigrated. The income inequality between rural and urban areas is severe. Additionally, low economic growth and high levels of violence and insecurity continue to affect Salvadoran society in profound ways.
Photo by Leiva/Silverlight for CRS
Patricia del Carmen Martínez is a coffee cutter working in the Finca Germania in Comasagua, La Libertad. The Blue Harvest project is helping people like her replant new varieties of leaf rust resistant coffees and find out ways to preserve water in soil.
The country is the second most deforested in the Western Hemisphere. Environmental degradation and global climate change make the country highly susceptible to natural disasters.
Despite trying circumstances, Catholic Relief Services’ reach is widespread. CRS and local partners work with families to improve farming systems and futures. The organization helps youth build job and life skills. CRS teaches peace and works for reconciliation in communities hurt by violence. But this work cannot be done without you.
When you donate to CRS, you do it all. You help families prepare for natural disasters, feed their families and protect the earth. You give young people an education and job training. You work to heal communities seemingly broken by violence and tension, and give them a way to build savings.
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In El Salvador, CRS’ work focuses on several areas, including disaster response, agriculture, youth, peacebuilding and microfinance.
CRS’ work in agriculture goes beyond growing more crops. Along with crop diversification, the organization promotes soil and water conservation, reforestation, and expanded access to markets. CRS introduces practices that make farming more environmentally friendly and sustainable, even during extended dry or rainy periods.
With the support of USAID, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, CRS has recently begun an initiative to reintroduce the pre-colonial crop, cacao, in El Salvador. When grown within a diversified system, cacao generates economic opportunity to family farmers while rehabilitating their often severely degraded soils. CRS is working with farmers to develop a value chain that extends from the production of cacao through its transformation to the sale of quality chocolate.
Photo by Oscar Leiva/Silverlight for CRS
Francisco Antonio López earns $5 a day at a coffee processing plant in San Miguel, El Salvador. Falling prices and leaf rust threaten jobs and water ecosystems. Ciudad Barrios relies on water from the springs in the mountainous coffee lands in Cacahuatique. Blue Harvest, led by Catholic Relief Services as part of the Global Water Initiative and funded by Keurig Green Mountain, promotes sustainable water management.
With partners, CRS addresses three key problems the country faces: youth unemployment and inactivity; high levels of violence in which young people are both victims and perpetrators of violence; and the creation of alternatives to migration for young people.
Through its YouthBuild project, CRS has provided vocational and entrepreneurial training, job-placement support, life skills and leadership development, and community service opportunities.
CRS promotes peacebuilding in El Salvador through its youth violence prevention programs. CRS and our local partners help marginalized youth participate in civic and economic life in El Salvador through skill-building workshops and community service programs. One result is increased trust and reconciliation between youth and their communities.
With Caritas, we help form community savings groups in the poorest regions of the country. The groups target all members of the community—youth, women, men—and provide them a safe and self-managed way to build community savings and access to credit.
Many of the most chronically malnourished households are found in Atacora department of northern Benin, with a 37.2% prevalence of chronic malnutrition and a rate of exclusive breastfeeding (12%) in Kouandé. Funded by private donations, and in collaboration with the National Food and Nutrition Council, UNICEF and the local health district, CRS’ exclusive breastfeeding project promotes social behavior change among 939 pregnant and lactating mothers to increase the rate of exclusive breastfeeding of infants between 0 and 6 months of age. The project relies on community health workers to expand their influence beyond pregnant and lactating mothers, to include spouses, grand-parents, community influencers and health center staff to create a more supportive environment in the household, the community and at the clinic, so mothers can more readily adopt and maintain good infant breast-feeding practices for the first six months after birth.
In partnership with the Benin Ministry of Health’s National Malaria Control program (PNLP), and with financial support from the Global Fund for Malaria, TB and HIV and AIDS, CRS supports 2,748 CHWs selected from 1,206 villages within 10 health zones and 420 Peer Educators to promote prevention messages, detect and treat simple cases, and refer complicated cases to health facilities and hospitals. Over 76,000 children under five were tested for malaria from January to June 2018, of which 61,559 cases were confirmed and treated with artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT).
CRS' History in El Salvador
CRS' first activity in El Salvador was a food program in 1960. We’re now heavily involved in helping Salvadorans to grow their own food. We also serve by delivering emergency aid, carrying out integrated development projects, and promoting charity, justice and solidarity.
Since its inception, CRS El Salvador has carried out emergency response and reconstruction efforts to assist Salvadorans affected by the civil war and numerous natural disasters including earthquakes, hurricanes and tropical storms. We also help communities to prevent and mitigate loss from natural disasters.
Since the 1992 peace accords ended 12 years of civil war, CRS El Salvador—in collaboration with our local partners—has implemented development projects in agriculture and environment, health, HIV and AIDS, microfinance, peacebuilding and civil society.