The Lata Foundation on funding vulnerable countries during the Covid-19 crisis

In any normal year, the Lata Foundation selects 10 charitable projects to work with on topics spanning conservation, support for disadvantaged children and women’s empowerment, but this year has seen the charity shift some of its focus to coronavirus crisis management.

“Covid-19 means our funding has dried up a lot but we do have an allocated budget for Covid-19 response and we thought working with partners that we already have contact with would be more effective,” says Jude Berry, chairman of the Lata Foundation. She explains “projects are having to shift focus from goals such as bringing visitors, to survival.”

Projects with purpose

With up to an extra £1,500 allocated to each project, the charity has been able to supply 71 sets of PPE to midwives in Guatemala’s remote and underprivileged community of Quetzaltenango. The essential items supplied include gowns, gloves and face coverings, as well as alcohol, gel and jars which can be used to mix and store antibacterial gel. Similar efforts made in partnership with Healing Venezuela have resulted in PPE deliveries to 19 health centres in the destination.

“The difficulty is getting this [PPE] into a country that struggles to find alcohol to make hand sanitiser,” says Katie Aston, head of projects at the Lata Foundation, adding that “with Healing Venezuela in particular, it’s amazing we’re able to operate even though the country is in political turmoil.”

Financial support for projects affected by the pandemic has also been distributed in Ecuador, Bolivia and Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, a project named Kids Saving the Rainforest has had to repurpose funds meant for the purchase of an X-ray machine and construction of a room to house it in to instead spend on essential running costs in the absence of visitors to the organisation’s sanctuary.