Honduras Free Trade Agreement Alert

Canada signed a free trade agreement with Honduras on 5 November. The agreement has had little coverage by Canadian media, despite the violence that is pervasive in Honduras. Our partner organization in the country reports that violence is a serious impediment to rural development. Note also that elections are scheduled in Honduras on 24 November. We urge Canadians to learn about the situation in Honduras and the implications of a free trade agreement with Canada. For more information please check out the following links.

Announcement from Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada:
http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/agr-acc/honduras/info.aspx?lang=eng

Editorial by the Americas Policy Group of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation:
http://www.ccic.ca/_files/en/working_groups/2013_May_APG_OpEd_Honduras.pdf

Articles on the free trade agreement and the Honduras election by the American-Canadian organization Rights Action:
http://rightsaction.org/.

Motorcycles and machetes make a big difference – Burkina Faso

Though we at World Neighbours Canada are only able to contribute what some might think a minuscule amount to support the local NGO (APDC ) in the Fada province of Burkina Faso, the reports we receive from this group let us know that that drop in the bucket is able to provide tangible support for them.

The 15000$ Canadian dollars we sent in allotments over the past year has helped to purchase, after much discussion and thought, TWO motorcycles. This has allowed two local permanent employees to more easily reach distant villages that are part of the program more often and to provide support and re-training of women and community leaders in those villages when it is needed. Prior to this, the existing motorcycle was declared unsafe and irreparable and reaching those villages on foot often meant that visits were not made when requested.

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Chorti update

Indigenous women’s project on track despite ‘state of siege’ involving mining companies

It’s been almost a year since the launch of the Chorti Project, on the border between Guatemala and Honduras, and things are on track despite a few early setbacks, said Bruce Petch, President of World Neighbours Canada.

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A 2013 Visit to Nepal

In April, 2013, I had the good fortune to visit Nepal to view the work of a Nepalese NGO, Tamakoshi Sewa Samiti (TSS).  I travelled with Dale Dodge of World Neighbours Canada (WNC) and Jack Nicholson of the Rotary Club of Aldergrove – together with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), we work with TSS to support water systems, sanitary latrines and smokeless ovens in Nepal.

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Kamloops Network Hosts WNC Guest

The Kamloops Global Awareness Network will be hosting an event called Empowering Communities in Nepal, as the third international guest speaker presentation of the Global Speaker Series, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, at Desert Gardens Community Centre.

The presentation will be delivered by Suresh Shrestha, executive director of Tamakoshi Sewa Samiti (TSS) and World Neighbours Canada partner NGO in Nepal.

For more information about the event, please see the article on Kamloops Global Awareness Network.

 

World Neighbours Associate appointed Minister of Agriculture in Guatemala 

Representatives of the Oliver-based World Neighbours Canada (WNC) organization are celebrating a recent announcement that a long-time friend and colleague, Elmer Lopez Rodriguez, has been appointed as Guatemala’s Minister of Agriculture.

On Jan. 14, Guatemala President Otto Perez Molina announced the appointment of Lopez Rodrigez, who had been serving as the Secretary for Rural Affairs.

World Neighbours Canada President Bruce Petch said Elmer was formerly the representative for World Neighbors (U.S). in Central America, and had been a key partner for World Neighbours Canada until he was appointed to the government.

“He is a brilliant and compassionate rural development practitioner and agronomist,” Petch said, adding Elmer worked closely with the group in setting up the La Esperanza program in Honduras.

The La Esperanza Development Program is a long-term program in Honduras, being implemented by Vecinos Honduras, World Neighbours Canada’s major partner in the region. The program’s objectives are to experiment, adapt and spread sustainable agriculture technologies; to strengthen local leadership and management capacity; to promote community and family health practices and to replicate the program in other communities.

What is development looking like in Canada these days?

Last year, in April of 2011, the Canadian International Development Association (CIDA) asked for call for proposals from Non Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) in Canada. This was the traditional way that CIDA decided where to put a sizeable percentage of its foreign aid funds for the past few decades. An NGO, like WNCanada, with a partner, like TSS in Nepal, would canvass people in their working area, find out what type of project would positively affect their quality of life, and then work out a plan to bring the project to fruition. The project plan would be presented to CIDA and if it satisfied the requirements for CIDA funding then CIDA would match our funding by as much as three to one.

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Honduras political 2012

I read of the prison fire that killed 350 prisoners in Comayagua on the morning I flew out of Honduras last February. I wasn’t shocked; it fit into a pattern I had been seeing for the past three weeks of my tour of Central America. As a volunteer with World Neighbours Canada, I was pursuing my decades’ long interest in village development by visiting five long-term projects among the most marginalized people of Honduras and Guatemala.

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