Relief Efforts in Ecuador
CARE has been present in the Latin America and Caribbean region since 1954. CARE has been responding to the Venezuela migrant and refugee crisis with a gender sensitive approach. CARE has been implementing emergency response interventions directly and through partners (in particular women’s organization) in Peru and Ecuador, Colombia and inside Venezuela. CARE focuses its response on some of the most vulnerable forcibly displaced and host community members, especially women, adolescents and girls, the LGBTQI+ population and young men.
CARE is responding in the areas of Sexual and Reproductive Health, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, Food and Nutrition Security, Shelter and cross-cutting Cash and Voucher Assistance. In every intervention, CARE aims to include up to 30% of hosting communities in order to bolster social cohesion.
As of the end of 2019 Ecuador was hosting some 500,000 Venezuelan refugee/migrants.
Since 2018, CARE has been providing humanitarian assistance to Venezuelan populations in Huaquillas, Ibarra, Quito, Tulcán and Lago Agrio. CARE is providing mutli-purpose cash transfers to some of the most vulnerable new arrivals, legal advisory medical attention with a focus on sexual and reproductive health as well as vouchers to access basic healthcare services CARE also provides sessions on preventing gender-based violence, trafficking and sexual and reproductive health and psychosocial support. CARE Ecuador and its partners are also working to upgrade shelters and provide hygiene promotion to new arrivals.
CARE’s other projects have focused on democracy and governance, education, health, water and sanitation, natural resource management, incomes and livelihoods, women’s empowerment and gender equality, economic development, climate change adaptation and emergency and humanitarian work. Through all our programs, we share our skills and knowledge with key local and national actors to build their capacity for development. We also support approaches developed by excluded groups and work with them to implement these.
CARE started working in Ecuador in 1962 with the aim of improving the standard of living of Ecuador’s indigenous ethnic groups.