A short time after the revolution brought the Sandinistas to power in 1979, Reagan’s US government illegally began to fund the armed resistance in the north of the country, who soon became known as the ‘contras’. The struggle against the well-armed contra and the simultaneous economic blockade severely tested the new government. Although it won…
The Leicester-Masaya Link Group has published a two-page review of its project work – with active projects both in Masaya and in Leicester itself. You can download the review as a pdf here. The link group’s AGM last week, attended by Leicester Mayor Peter Soulsby, had a report from Masaya by Skype which updated members both…
The latest small stage of our solar project (‘Proyecto Sol’) brings to just 202 the total of households where electricity has been installed in the rural parts of Masaya since 2005, for a total investment of just over $200,000. We’re still working in the isolated area between Nicaragua’s two big lakes, which ironically is less…
Last week the local school celebrated completion of about $80,000 worth of work to totally refurbish its two buildings and provide a proper outside play and assembly area. The school, a basic structure originally built by local organisation MASINFA in 1993, with funding from Masaya’s twin city of Nijmegen in Holland, was badly in need…
In recent stories in the Nicaragua Dispatch, Nicaragua has been described as a renewable energy paradise and as ranking third in the Latin America renewables market. But neither story mentions what has become Nicaragua’s forgotten resource: solar energy. Perhaps this is not surprising as the government’s own assessments of its achievement in moving away from…
Proyecto Sol (‘Project Sun’) has been installing solar panels in remote rural communities for nine years. It’s about to start a new phase in the community known simply as ‘Sector 80’, an isolated area to the north of Lake Nicaragua. This community, which had no electricity at all and still has no water supply, received…