Central America
Projects
Clean Cooking
Since 1998, we’ve been working with our partners and local community members to design clean cookstoves that reduce deadly indoor air pollution, deforestation, and fuel costs.
Gender Equity
Tz’unun: Ending Environmental Violence Against Indigenous Women in Guatemala through Empowerment in Community Forestry, Agroecology, and Collective Healing Spaces. Co-implemented with Utz Che’
Travel with TWP
Learn more about the TWP programs by visiting them!
Locations
El Salvador
Steep, seismic and lush, El Salvador is a unique treasure in the region. Like their neighbors, Salvadorans have endured a tumultuous past that has eroded human rights and environmental protections, and destabilized the government. Since 2001, TWP has partnered with Árboles y Agua para el Pueblo (AAP) to address the root causes of poverty and environmental degradation in the region, in order to slow climate-forced migration of thousands each year. Lack of economic opportunity, locally-driven markets, gender equity, and a changing climate all threaten rural livelihoods in El Salvador.
Honduras
Honduras is facing some of the toughest social and environmental challenges in its history, with high rates of out migration due to lack of economic opportunity, and negative impacts of climate change. In the last 10 years, the Southern pine beetle, coffee rust, extreme forest fires, and back-to-back hurricanes have destroyed large areas of forest and farmland, while hundreds of thousands of people have become internally displaced refugees and others have been forced to flee the country.
Guatemala
After a 36 year Civil War from 1960-1996, rural and Indigenous Guatemalans are still fighting to rebuild their lives. Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people—forcibly displaced from their territories in the last two decades—are building a locally-led movement for social and environmental justice. In 2012, TWP began a partnership with the Asociación de Forestería Comunitaria de Guatemala Utz Ché (meaning “good tree” in the Mayan language K’iche’) to strengthen marginalized communities’ ability to protect the environment, and envision a new future in the Southeast.
Nicaragua
Since 2000, we have partnered with PROLEÑA to plant trees, design, manufacture, and distribute clean cookstoves, and promote renewable energy and resource efficiency throughout Nicaragua. In addition to pressure from agriculture and ranching, the country’s forests are at risk due to harvesting of trees for fuelwood, both for cooking at the household level and for industries. Climate change has led to severe cycles of drought and flooding, resulting in the loss of soil fertility and annual crops, affecting vulnerable rural farmers.
