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Saludos Amigos! Nick Rahaim here, the program director for the Jiquilisco Bay Alliance. I recently returned to Oakland, California after a 5-week trip to El Salvador to work with our community partners Asociación Cincahuite and Asociación Mangle. I have many exciting things to report, even as new challenges have emerged. We’re making great progress on the first Fishery Improvement Project (FIP) in El Salvador with six artisanal fishing cooperatives, our mangrove reforestation project is literally taking root, and our public spaces and organizational capacity building initiatives have yielded real results.
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Very real challenges remain, but in these challenges the Jiquilisco Bay Alliance finds resolve. Our focus is myopic, we only work in the Jiquilisco Bay region of El Salvador. The work we do is based on friendship and solidarity. There are risks associated with any kind of international work and we take steps to mitigate these risks.
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This myopic focus is also our strength. We facilitate financial and technical support provided by international organizations and foundations interested in working in the region. We advocate on behalf of our community partners to bring in continued support for their work. My work in the region began as a Fulbright fellow working with Asociación Cincahuite in 2022 and 2023. I could have left Puerto Parada behind me when the fellowship came to an end. I would still have friends there and the work I did would have had its benefits. But, the continuity of support over years and decades is what creates lasting benefits.
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The Jiquilisco Bay Alliance is in it for the long run. To do so, we could use your help now. You could help a lot by making a tax-deductible contribution today!
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Developing the first Fishery Improvement Project in El Salvador
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Artisanal fishing sustains hundreds of families in the Jiquilisco Bay and over the past two decades community leaders have led initiatives to lower impacts on mangrove habitats. Nonetheless, there is still a lack of both ecological and economic data in the region. I was naive when I first arrived in Puerto Parada in November 2022. I had research questions on the size of the blue economy in the region, its vulnerability to climate change, and the sustainability of fisheries in the Jiquilisco Bay. All worthy investigations, but not only was there a lack of baseline data to answer those questions, there were more pressing needs to be addressed.
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Foundation support for Asociación Cincahuite’s Pesca Limpia (Clean Fishing) program dried up in 2023 during my time there. The program was very successful, bringing an end to fishing with explosives in the mangroves and transitioning to low-impact hook and line fishing. Fishing cooperatives in the program banded together and created a commercialization committee to sell their catch directly to consumers in the nearby city of Usulután. All of this improved the lives of fishermen and their families, but outside funding was still needed to locally manage the fishery and the Pesca Limpia program.
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Working with Asociación Cincahuite and 6 artisanal fishing cooperatives, we set out to find a new path forward and learned more about FIPs. They are the international standard for bringing fisheries toward sustainability while also increasing the economic wellbeing of fishing communities. This is accomplished through a five-year process setting goals based on the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) fisheries standards.
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Once joining the board of JBA, we applied for and received grants from the Resources Legacy Fund and the Dalis Foundation to launch the FIP with Asociación Cincahuite last year. This is an ambitious project and is more than the Jiquilisco Bay Alliance and the Asociación Cincahuite can do without support. We’re happy to have hired our good friend and executive director of Asociación Mangle, José María “Chema” Argueta, to be the program coordinator.
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The most complicated element of this early FIP phase is the biological needs assessment. This report will identify available fishery and biological indicators, collect basic fishery data, and identify the information gaps where further investigation is needed. To do this, we have teamed up with the Universidad de El Salvador (UES) marine science department, ICMARES. A team of biology professors and students travel to Puerto Parada from San Salvador once every two weeks to collect data on the fish harvest by the fishing cooperatives and will soon begin on-the-water studies.
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We’re also collaborating with the economics department at Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) to conduct a socioeconomic analysis and a study on the climate impacts and food security in Puerto Parada. Led by Professor Meraris Lopez, two groups of students are traveling to Puerto Parada four times over their spring semester to hold community focus groups to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. These reports aren’t required by the FIP, but will allow us to better understand the communities where we work and provide baseline socioeconomic data for this and other projects.
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I was lucky enough to join the student groups, both from UES and UCA, on multiple occasions last month. We have a great group of students, and it’s heartening to see that this work not only supports our friends at Asociación Cincahuite but also provides field experience for university students in El Salvador. It also makes me happy to see the original research questions I came to El Salvador with as a Fulbright fellow in 2022 are starting to be answered with a lot of help from friends I’ve made along the way.
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The Importance of Unrestricted Funds
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Anyone who has worked in the non-profit world knows one of greatest challenges is securing unrestricted funds. Foundation grants largely go to programmatic costs and the administrative fees you can pull from these funds are never enough to cover operating expenses, nevermind facility improvements.
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In the spring of 2023, while I was still living in El Salvador, JBA Executive Director Jamie Stanton and I launched a fundraising campaign to raise unrestricted funds for Asociación Cincahuite. No hoops, no red tape, just money to use how they saw best fit. And thanks to all of you we were able to provide more than $13,000 dollars in unrestricted funds.
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During my recent trip, I slept in a new dormitory on the Asociación Cincahuite property adjacent to their office. Asociación Cincahuite was able to pay off the remaining balance on the loan they had taken out years ago to purchase the property. There are no hotels in Puerto Parada, making it difficult for guests to visit on extended stays, so they decided to build a new building on the property that includes a dorm room and an office to give more privacy for personal conversations that arise when working with young mothers. The roof of the main office building was replaced, something that has been needed for years, and the pavilion for the community space outside the office was expanded with a newly poured concrete foundation.
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All of this was funded by the $13,000 we provided in 2023. For us at the Jiquilisco Bay Alliance, we believe a major element of organizational capacity building is not to over complicate things with a lot of paperwork and reporting, but trust funds provided will go to where it’s needed most.
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The Potential of Ecotourism
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Puerto Parada and the Bajo Lempa are not areas that received a lot of visitors even as they lie next to thick mangrove forests with an intricate network of canals and channels leading to the Jiquilisco Bay. The bay is also a crucial habitat for sea turtles, with 45 percent of all Eastern Pacific Hawksbill turtles nesting in the region. There’s a lot for intrepid travellers to see, but accessing it can be difficult.
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Ecotourism is tricky. In my years working on various projects in Latin America, I’ve seen how often the bulk of ecotourism funds go to urban tour operators, with communities receiving just a small fraction of the income generated. We do not yet have specific ecotourism projects, but we’re beginning to explore possibilities and lay the groundwork initiatives with real community benefits. We have a few new partnerships and programmatics in the works on this front and we hope to be able to provide more details in the coming months.
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We’re a small, volunteer-run organization with a focus on the Jiquilisco Bay region of El Salvador which is one of the largest expanses of mangroves in Central America and is a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance.
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The region is among the poorest in El Salvador with limited infrastructure and public investment. Communities largely rely on subsistence agricultural, artisanal fishing, and remittances from family members abroad to meet their basic needs.
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While economic poverty is real, community organizing and solidarity is strong. Both Asociación Cincahuite and Asociación Mangle are staffed and operated by community members with elected boards composed of local leaders. They work closely with agricultural and fishing cooperatives, communities organizations and families, to improve ecological and economic conditions in the Jiquilisco Bay area.
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Our work is about working collaboratively to provide technical and financial resources needed to meet the goals of our community partners. We’ve taken many steps to do just that and with your support we can do much more. Please support this work by making a tax-deductible contribution today. ¡Adelante! -Nick
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