Peru

Life in high Andes of Peru is a tightrope existence — with no safety net. Poorly built homes, roads and facilities cannot hold up to events like the 8.0 magnitude earthquakes in 2007 or increasingly frequent floods and landslides. The dangerous mountain environment makes everyday tasks, and survival, more tenuous and difficult.

Thousands of people live without access to clean and safe drinking water or irrigation for their crops. Facing droughts every three to five years, farmers understandably try to cultivate as much as possible when they can so there’s some food to set aside for the following year. Yet farming this way taxes the already thin topsoil and means less and less food from the same plots. By trying to survive, people are essentially putting their future livelihoods at risk.

Peru has many natural resources; the key will be good stewardship of them.

With your support, LWR works to end poverty and human suffering in the high Andean regions of Peru.

• Training mayors and municipal figures in good governance practices such as good budgeting and planning, transparency and fair legislation, which helps ensure that communities will benefit from our work

• Promoting programs that teach healthy hygiene habits like hand washing, using latrines and purifying water
• Getting people the tools to increase their incomes and access nutritious food

• Helping small dairy farmers access microcredit loans and form collectives that will let them double milk production while making it cleaner, and produce better quality dairy products like cheese
• Giving farmer committees the resources so they can install multi-family irrigation systems themselves and promote family gardens

• Teaching the importance of managing water and other natural resources
• Supplying electricity to rural communities through renewable wind, water and solar energy sources

• Providing water management plans so that municipalities can develop water projects and farmer committees can manage them
• Teaching simple water purification techniques to keep people healthy

29,164,883
TOTAL POPULATION

$4,200
GNI* PER CAPITA

34.8%
AT OR BELOW POVERTY LINE

73 years
LIFE EXPECTANCY

61% (rural)
ACCESS TO IMPROVED WATER SOURCE

68%
ACCESS TO IMPROVED SANITATION