Nicaragua

As a result of the social and polit­i­cal cri­sis that began in April 2018, Lux­em­bourg made changes to its devel­op­ment aid sup­port to Nicaragua. As direct dis­burse­ments to the gov­ern­ment had been frozen and the new Indica­tive Coop­er­a­tion Pro­gramme (ICP) had not been signed, 2019 saw the end of bilat­er­al pro­grammes in tourism, voca­tion­al train­ing and health. In rela­tion to health, the con­struc­tion of a pri­ma­ry hos­pi­tal in El Cuá is of par­tic­u­lar note. This will make it pos­si­ble to deliv­er high-qual­i­ty health­care to a rur­al pop­u­la­tion of more than 50,000 people.

In 2019 Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion was able to repo­si­tion its devel­op­ment aid to Nicaragua in order to pro­vide human­i­tar­i­an sup­port to the pop­u­la­tion and to strength­en its sup­port for Nicaraguan civ­il soci­ety, par­tic­u­lar­ly regard­ing the pro­tec­tion of human rights and demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues. Thus, in 2019 sup­port for the WFP school meals pro­gramme was signed, seek­ing to pro­vide food secu­ri­ty in rur­al areas, along­side new fund­ing for the Civ­il Soci­ety Sup­port Fund (FASOC) man­aged by Oxfam and a project by the Front­line Defend­ers NGO to sup­port human rights activists. Coop­er­a­tion with local NGOs has also been strength­ened through the micro-projects fund of the Embassy in Managua.

Two Lux­em­bour­gish NGOs, Frères des hommes and Terre des hommes, have imple­ment­ed projects in 2019, tar­get­ing the com­pre­hen­sive care of chil­dren and young peo­ple at social risk, capac­i­ty-build­ing (includ­ing food capac­i­ty) and the infor­mal economy.

Final­ly, Lux­em­bourg has con­tin­ued to strength­en its sup­port for region­al projects in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Cen­tral Amer­i­can Inte­gra­tion Sys­tem (SICA), of which Nicaragua is a mem­ber country.