STRO-employee Suzanne Olivier just returned from her visit to the STRO-projects in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. In her first blog about her trip she tells about a visit to cooperative "20 de Abril" in the north of Nicaragua. They are STRO's local partner in a project that aims to make remittances safer and cheaper and increase their impact on the local economy.

On November 24th we started out early for our trip to one of STRO’s newest partners, Cooperative 20 de Abril, based in Quilalí. Quilalí is 263 kilometers  from Managua in the Northern province of Nueva Segovia and takes around seven hours if traveling by bus. However, today we are in luck: for the last part of the trip the Cooperative sent one of their personnel (Manuel) in an 4x4 to pick us up.  Much of this trip is on unpaved, muddy roads winding upward into the mountains. I see no busses or vehicles returning– Manuel tells us that there is only one bus per day leaving , and sometimes, due to hard rains, bad roads or technical difficulties of the bus, there is no connection at all. Children that study in Quilalí often have to walk to school for several hours; and indeed we see heaps of children in school uniform heading back home on foot. These are the same roads that remittances (remittance are payments sent by migrant workers to their home countries / communities) receivers have to travel to collect their money at the Cooperative head office in Quilalí . Many local people travel up to 8 hours to collect funds transferred, returning with large quantities cash, putting them at risk for robbery.

After a short stop at the hotel (no running water, but strangely enough with wifi) we meet the Cooperative staff and management to talk about next steps in the C20dAbril and STRO partnership, which was joking referred to as something that has turned into a marriage. Cd20Abril may be one of the newest partners in the Central American region, but they have been working very hard on the communication and administrative preparations for the launch of the Coopevales (the Commodity Backed Currency, with bonus 1%) that will be launched on the celebration of the Cooperative store, on December 8th. News about the launch will follow shortly! Before the project designed for the “Remittances project” can be refined, another trip to the field is of utmost importance, hence tomorrow we will go rural.