Why Clean Water Is Still Out of Reach for Half of Rural Guatemala
Walk into many villages in the Guatemalan highlands and you will find a problem that feels like it belongs to another century. Families turn...
Read story → Women & GirlsThe Hidden Hours: How Water Collection Steals Time From Women and Girls
In households without water on the property, someone has to go get it. In rural Guatemala that someone is almost always a woman or a girl. T...
Read story → Poverty & EconomyFour Out of Five: The Reality of Indigenous Poverty in Guatemala
Guatemala is a country of deep inequality, and nowhere is that clearer than along ethnic lines. Government survey data shows that more than ...
Read story → Migration & DiasporaThe $21 Billion Lifeline: How the Diaspora Keeps Guatemala Afloat
There is one number that explains the relationship between Guatemala and its people living abroad better than any other. In a recent year, G...
Read story → Health & NutritionStunted Futures: Guatemala's Child Malnutrition Crisis
Guatemala carries a statistic that should stop anyone in their tracks. Around 47 percent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutri...
Read story → Migration & DiasporaComing Back to Nothing: The Hard Reality of Deportation and Return
Every year thousands of Guatemalans who left in search of work are sent back, often to the very conditions that pushed them to leave. Many s...
Read story → SolutionsHow Fair Microfinance Actually Works, and How It Goes Wrong
Microfinance has a mixed reputation, and honestly it has earned both halves of it. Done well, a small loan can let a market vendor buy inven...
Read story → WaterWhen Water Makes You Sick: The Disease Burden of Dirty Water
We tend to think of water as the thing that keeps us alive, and it is. But in much of rural Guatemala, the water that should sustain a famil...
Read story → Education & ChildrenWhy So Many Girls Leave School Early in Rural Guatemala
In many rural Guatemalan families, a girl's education quietly ends years before a boy's. The reasons are rarely about ability and almost alw...
Read story → Poverty & EconomyThe Farmer's Trap: Working the Land but Locked Out of Capital
Most rural Guatemalan families are tied to agriculture in some way, yet farming is rarely a path out of poverty for them. Smallholder farmer...
Read story → Health & NutritionGiving Birth Far From Help: Maternal Health in the Highlands
For a woman in a remote Guatemalan village, pregnancy and childbirth carry risks that have little to do with biology and everything to do wi...
Read story → WaterThe Dry Corridor: When the Rains Stop Coming
Across a band of eastern and southern Guatemala known as the dry corridor, the weather has become a gamble that families increasingly lose. ...
Read story → Poverty & EconomyBacking the Women Who Already Run the Economy
Spend a morning in any rural Guatemalan market and you will see who keeps the local economy moving. Women run the stalls, sell the produce, ...
Read story → Migration & DiasporaBeyond Remittances: How the Diaspora Can Build, Not Just Send
For millions of Guatemalan families, the monthly transfer from a relative in the United States is the difference between getting by and goin...
Read story → Women & GirlsThe Silence Around Menstruation, and What It Costs Girls
Menstruation is a normal part of life for half the population, yet in many rural Guatemalan communities it is wrapped in silence and shame. ...
Read story → SolutionsWhy One Clean Well Changes Everything in a Village
It is easy to underestimate a well. It looks like a simple thing, a hole and a pump. But in a community that has never had safe water close ...
Read story → SolutionsWhat It Means to Sponsor a Well, and Why Companies Are Doing It
Among all the ways to support water work, sponsoring a well stands out because it is so concrete. A donor does not give money into a vague g...
Read story → Poverty & EconomyThe Loan Sharks Filling the Gap Banks Leave Behind
When a rural family needs money urgently, for medicine, for seed, to cover a bad month, and no bank will lend to them, someone else always w...
Read story → Migration & DiasporaThe Families Left Behind When a Parent Migrates
Migration is usually told as the story of the person who leaves. But for every Guatemalan who heads north, there is a family that stays. Chi...
Read story → Education & ChildrenLong Roads and Empty Classrooms: Rural Education in Guatemala
Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, the way out of poverty that each generation can offer the next. In rural Guatemala, that pr...
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