Nicaragua

In honor of International Women’s Day, we share a story about an inspiring woman in Nicaragua who has found independence and self-sufficiency through farming.

In Nicaragua, Iveth Juárez, a small business owner who processes and sells cereal to the local market, had attended seminars, workshops, courses and training sessions on accounting and finance. But at the end of each session, she always felt the same sense of confusion.

The Jorge Salazar Cooperative, located in the northern municipality of El Tuma-La Dalia, is a collective of 46 farmers – mostly veterans of Nicaragua’s civil war in the 1980s, which devastated the country’s economy. In an effort to incorporate ex-guerillas back into civilian society, TechnoServe – with the support of…

Since trading their guns for plows at the end of the Nicaraguan civil war, Modesto Reyes and his fellow coffee farmers have transformed the community of Pueblo Nuevo, with better health services and new education facilities for its children and stable livelihoods for hundreds of men and women. Reyes…

Nicaraguan farmers Filadelfo Sotelo and his son Cesar Eduardo Sotelo had very little time to spend with their family. They worked long hours farming crops such as beans, corn, tomatoes, and passion fruit. They also performed odd jobs just to make ends meet. Despite this, they never…

Hundreds of thousands of poor rural residents depend on the Nicaraguan dairy industry for their livelihoods. But low-quality milk and limited marketing and management skills prevent many of the businesses in this sector from gaining access to good markets. The San Francisco de Asís dairy farmer cooperative wanted to…

The Nicaraguan civil war left former combatants José Adán López and Luis Marin Garcia destitute and dependent on government assistance. Now the two men are president and vice president, respectively, of Union de Cooperativas Agropecuarios de Servicios Unidas de Mancotal (UCASUMAN), one of Nicaragua’s leading small-farmer export associations in specialty…

The town of Nagarote, Nicaragua is known as the birthplace of quesillos, a cheese served with tortillas, onions and sour cream. Quesillos is one of Nicaragua’s signature dishes – and few make it better than Fernando Roa, owner of Quesillos Gourmet Mi Finca.

Before receiving support from TechnoServe, Nidia Yescas cooked on a metal drum cut in half over a wood fire. Her kitchen lacked electricity, water and other essentials. When Nidia Yescas lost her husband, she faced an uncertain future. Her family’s livelihood was its plantain farm in Rivas, a rural town…