When Communities Lead: Transforming Local Systems for Climate Resilience in Central America’s Dry Corridor
Because an entire region is affected by the intensity of El Niño phenomenon for many decades, Oxfam in Central America has started a regional program: Acción Temprana en Centroamérica (ATECA), meaning Early Action in Central America. This multi-country program partners with four local non-government organizations (NGOs), ASEDECHI and Corazón del Maiz in Guatemala and Fundación Campo and CORDES in El Salvador, to strengthen communities’ disaster preparedness and their capacity to respond to and recover from recurring small-scale disasters induced by the El Niño/la Niña oscillation.
Back in 2017, when the Oxfam and local partner teams carried out a capacity and vulnerability assessment across 48 communities, many participants did not perceive drought as a disaster or a risk, but simply as an everyday phenomenon that they had lived with for decades. The first step toward change was to recognize that what had become normalized was, in fact, a recurring climate risk that shaped people’s lives, livelihoods, and food security, and one that could be anticipated and prepared for. Since then, Oxfam and partners have been supporting families with livelihood strengthening and diversification. By adapting their livelihoods to unpredictable climate changes, families can produce diverse, nutritious food without worrying about getting the next meal.
Local Humanitarian Leadership in Central America Fighting for Climate Resilience
Understanding the habits and customs of communities, even speaking Mayan languages (Achí and Chortí), the local NGOs have been very intentional in including women and youth – who have long been excluded. Before ATECA, these groups never felt confident enough to participate in communal decision-making spaces to voice their needs. The local NGOs established Women’s Leadership Schools, youth vocational training, and delivered Disaster Risk Reduction trainings to equip Community Emergency Committees’ (CEC) members with technical capacities.
Youth and women have gradually taken on strategic leadership roles. The recent Oxfam evaluation (available in English and Spanish) conducted in 2025 reported that 90% of the women interviewed in El Salvador reported feeling “confident to act proactively.” In Guatemala, 38 women formally joined their respective Community Development Councils, an existing government-accredited structure that has integrated CEC members and DRR responsibilities, with one woman assuming presidency of this local structure. Youth and women have become key players in their local Early Warning Systems through technological monitoring, as part of the Network of Local Weather Observers.
From Local Leadership to Community Power
What the 2025 evaluation report also tells us is that, instead of reacting to disasters the new community leaders have now put preventive measures in place and manage a community-based Early Warning System. Without the support of local NGOs to effectively equip and establish an efficient weather data system, this community-managed Early Warning System would not exist. With rain gauges spread around different geographical locations (highlands, midland, and lowlands) and climate monitoring devices, youth, female and male farmers have taken ownership of the system, collecting weather information, interpreting it, and sharing it widely on a daily basis. With this simple yet essential technology, community leaders use the information to take the necessary actions to adapt their practices, protecting the cycle of the plants and their production, supporting hundreds of families.
Weather Observers are volunteer women and men from highly climate-vulnerable communities who generate localized climate information and directly and periodically share it in different spaces. When the Weather Observers share this information, which is not collected anywhere else in the country, and submit it to the municipal Civil Defense Services, it then feeds into the district’s Agroclimatic Roundtables and reaches the National Meteorological Services, where it is considered in their weather forecasts.
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