The Nueva Segovia Case in Nicaragua: inequities in rural communities
By María Elena Salgado, intern at UCA Interdisciplinary Institute of Natural Science and Eddy Moreno, political activist and former student of the UCA living in exile
Inequities are inevitably linked to the discussion of ethical criteria. The term inequity differs from inequality as inequities are preventable situations. In the context of the global coronavirus pandemic, these gaps become even more evident and one potential indicator is access to safe water and sanitation.
According to resolution 64/292 adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 28th of July 2010, access to water and sanitation is recognized as a human right, and states and international organizations are called upon to provide financial resources to let people afford the access to these basic services, particularly in developing countries.
Ten years after the publication of this resolution, the outlook for Nicaragua looks very far from achieving the Sustainable Development Goal #6: Ensure water availability, sustainable management and sanitation for everyone.
For the prevention of the coronavirus pandemic, access to water and sanitation becomes fundamental for proper hand washing, but these days it is more of a privilege than a human right since not all sectors of society have the coverage, quantity, continuity, cost or quality desired.
In recent days, inhabitants of rural communities in Nueva Segovia, that are in a natural reserve called Serranías de Dipilto Jalapa Natural Reserve, have denounced the lack of water they currently face, a problem that already has been accentuated in the last years. The complicity of the authorities has also been denounced for many years, only this time we have evidence from the databases of the state authorities that grant these logging permits.
Access to water and sanitation in rural areas
In the Diagnostic of Water in the Americas, it is stated that in Nicaragua the available water resource is 38,668 cubic meters per capita each year, which is approximately four times the availability of water in the United States or some European countries such as Switzerland. However, this abundant availability does not ensure that it reaches all sectors of the population equally.
As said by Water for People, in rural areas the water service accessibility is at 60% and basic sanitation at 62%. According to Nicaragua’s second report on the human right to drinking water and sanitation in rural areas made by ONGAWA, more people haven’t access to improved water in the Central and Caribbean regions, and in drastic situations, some families have to rely on surface water, that is can be critical for their health. This is the case for the department of Nueva Segovia, which is located in the central region of the country and its people have had to resort to surface water sources due to the shortage of this vital liquid.
The issue of gender inequalities is also evident, as most adult women and girls are responsible for travelling long distances to collect water. Furthermore, according to the survey conducted by ONGAWA in this second report, the fact that in 62% of hospitals and 46% of schools, there are no toilet services separated by sex, affecting women and girls in particular.
The problem in the communities of Nueva Segovia
The department of Nueva Segovia is located in the central region of Nicaragua, adjacent to the border with Honduras, and is part of the well-known Central American dry corridor. This is a large area that runs parallel to the Pacific coast from Chiapas, Mexico, to western Panama, which is the tropical dry forest ecoregion.
In the dry corridor there is an abnormal distribution of rainfall, which causes a marked drought. This obviously affects groundwater recharge, and especially the recharge of mountain aquifers, which have a lower storage volume, as it’s the case with the communities in the area. In addition to this, agriculture and livestock farming are an essential of many communities; livelihoods.
In addition, high concentrations of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater have been found in the region, exceeding the WHO recommended limit of ten micrograms per litre, thus limiting available sources of this supply.
The problems that weigh on this region go beyond its geographical location, since factors of anthropic origin also contribute to environmental deterioration. These include indiscriminate logging, forest burning, contamination of surface water sources and sand mining.
These rural communities are located on the outskirts of the Dipilto Jalapa protected reserve, which does not yet have an approved management plan. But the ministerial resolution issued in November 2018 states that under no circumstances will the extraction of firewood for commercial purposes be approved.
All these problems have triggered the current demand of the communities; who have had to protest in order to have their demands heard by the authorities. The farmer’s main request is that government agencies intervene in the area and cancel logging permits at key water recharge sites. But, above all, they should respond to the lack of water they face.
A State responsibility
In Nicaragua’s general water law, article five establishes that “It is an obligation and an indeclinable priority of the State to promote, facilitate, and adequately regulate the supply of drinking water in quantity and quality to the Nicaraguan people, at differentiated costs and favoring the sectors with fewer economic resources. The provision of this vital service to consumers in an evident state of extreme poverty may not be interrupted, except by force majeure, and in any case, they must be provided with temporary supply alternatives”.
The state has developed projects such as the Integral Sectorial Program of Water and Human Sanitation, in which it managed to reach more than 68,000 beneficiaries with a water supply and more than 44,000 people with sanitation, however, these efforts have not been enough to reduce the gap between safe water and sanitation in the different sectors of the population.
The lack of synergy in the actions of the institutions has created a duplication of efforts that does not allow for the achievement of the planned goals and has led to the failure of other projects. A clear example can be seen in the communities of Nueva Segovia, where the Forestry Ministry has granted timber extraction permits that have contributed to the current water crisis.
In previous days, the institutional mail server of this government entity was tapped by hackers of unknown origin. In an exhaustive survey we were able to collect data on extraction permits in the Nueva Segovia area, adding up to a total of 1,330,274 trees in the period from 2004 until 2020 where 82% of the permits have been granted for selling.
Based on the data from the Global Forest Watch platform, from 2001 to 2018, 1560 hectare of tree cover was lost in Nueva Segovia. And from 2001 to 2012, it acquired 318 hectares of tree cover, which means that there was no compensation. And only in Dipilto, only 178 hectares of coverage was recovered.
We got in touch with a resident of Somoto, a place that is ten minutes away from the community El Arado, which belongs to the protected area of the Dipilto and Jalapa mountain ranges. She told us that it “is common to see trucks full of wood around Ocotal and that the army only shows up in the area when the forest is on fire”.
Proliferation of diseases due to water scarcity
As stated by WHO, access to water, sanitation and hygiene is fundamental to health and plays an important role in the prevention and management of diseases, including tropical diseases such as malaria, cholera, dengue, yellow fever, which affect more than a billion people in the poorest communities.
In accordance with data from the UN and UNICEF, three billion people in the world do not have the basic conditions necessary in their homes to comply with the main form of preventing the spread of coronavirus: hand washing.
Data obtained from the records of the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health indicates that the main causes of hospitalization in Nueva Segovia correspond to diseases such as pneumonia, suspected dengue fever, diarrhea and infectious gastroenteritis and cystitis and urinary tract infections. Indeed, many of these are tropical diseases and are related to water pollution, which indicates the vulnerability of the population and gives us an idea of the poor quality of water consumed.
With regard to the COVID-19, there are no known cases in the department due to the concealment of information and lack of transparency on the part of the health authorities. Besides, food insecurity in communities due to drought can be a potential factor in acquiring the virus as poor nutrition weakens the immune system and increases the risk of death.
How can this inequities gap be overcome?
Cases of coronavirus in the country continue to increase and deaths are evident due to the testimonies of villagers who have had to bury their victims in secrecy and under threat from government authorities.
In light of this, the outlook for the rural population looks discouraging, as it is almost a month since their water protest and the authorities have yet to respond. To solve these problems in the future, it is necessary to recognize the crucial role of water in the development of society, both socially and economically, and to invest an adequate budget to the needs of the most vulnerable sectors.
The call is again for changing the extractive models that imply economic development and that, instead, in situations of global crisis such as this one, increase the vulnerability of the most impoverished and marginalized sectors of the city. It is also necessary to build more transparent government entities and country’s environmental laws have to be enforced and regulated.
In Nicaragua there are initiatives such as “Ayuda en Acción”; This is an NGO that is promoting the construction of toilets, water collection systems, provision of water filters and solid waste management to avoid contamination of surface sources. You can help this organization through donations enabled from their website.
Today, valuing our privileges and putting solidarity into practice will help us to overcome this crisis in a more advantageous way and to initiate a new development model that will help us to build more sustainable and inclusive cities.
