2022

“THE NEXT TEN YEARS”

This was a landmark year for us at Caminos de Agua as we celebrated our 10th Anniversary of working on water issues. We are deeply grateful for the involvement and support of our growing community in making this critically-needed work a reality for so many at risk in our region and beyond. Our water crisis is complex, affecting hundreds of thousands of people regionally – and tens of millions of people all across Mexico – requiring the vast network of allies, water advocates, and other collaborators we’ve built to make a meaningful impact on our water reality.

2021

“MEETING THE CHALLENGE”

While the need for our work was greater than ever in 2021, so were the challenges. As we entered the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, rural communities in Guanajuato were hit harder than ever before. Reports of cases, along with hospitalizations and deaths, started rising dramatically in rural villages during the early weeks of 2021, forcing us to shut down all community work to limit exposure of our staff as well as the communities where we work. In early March, we regrouped and called a summit with our grassroots organizational partners, who represent dozens of rural communities, to figure out how to move forward. The response was unified and deafening, COVID or not, “communities need clean water – now more than ever.” So, we got back to work.

2020

“CONFRONTING CRISIS”

As COVID-19 began to ravage the world in early 2020, we braced ourselves here in Central Mexico, knowing the virus would impact the rural communities where we work much more acutely. Many of these communities only receive water for a few hours once or twice a week. For far too many, that means there is no consistent water access to meet the hygiene requirements necessary to control the spread of the virus. As a result, doing work in these communities immediately became riskier – requiring much more preparation, care, and expense.

2019
“reaching further”

This was not a good year for water globally, and especially in our region – making our work more important than ever. The state of Guanajuato, in central México where we work, was named one of the most hydraulically stressed regions on the entire planet. Compounding the issue, we continue seeing increasing levels of contamination in regional water supplies with arsenic levels reaching as much as 22 times the World Health Organization recommendations. To effectively address this growing crisis,  we’ve continued to build on and create new partnerships at all levels – working with community collaborations, NGOs, and local, state, and even federal government (pg. 9) to substantially increase our reach.