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Support Carolina and her community who dream of building Maracaibo's first community-led birthing center that weaves together ancestral and traditional medicine with the safety of modern accompaniment.
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Visit the Cookie Policy pageVenezuela: In a broken health system where life hangs by a thread, Carolina rises as a maternity warrior. Drawing strength from her past, she relentlessly preserves the vital cord between pregnant women and their babies.
Carolina and her community dream of building Maracaibo's first community-led birthing center that weaves together ancestral and traditional medicine with the safety of modern accompaniment.
This dream is born from a healthcare system in profound collapse, one meticulously documented by Venezuela's own National Hospital Survey (ENH). For over five years, a network of resident doctors has monitored the country's 40 largest hospitals. Their 2024 Mid Year Report reveals a stark reality.
In the first half of 2024, the average shortage of basic emergency supplies across these hospitals was 36%, a figure that has not improved in years. In the operating rooms, where many births become surgeries, the shortage soars to 74%. The most critical gaps are not abstract: asthma inhalers, painkillers, and antihypertensive medications are among the items most frequently missing from emergency rooms.
This scarcity directly impacts a patient's ability to simply receive care. The ENH found that in 91% of monitored hospitals, patients are asked to provide their own supplies just to be admitted to the operating room, regardless of whether the surgery is an emergency. For a woman needing a C-section, her family must first find and pay for items like sutures, painkillers, and even sterile gowns. By July 2024, the cost of this basic surgical kit averaged $103 USD. To put this in perspective, Venezuela's minimum wage at the time was approximately $3.5 per month, meaning a family would need nearly 29 months of minimum wage income to afford the supplies for a single, life-saving surgery.
The consequences are measured in time and lives. The "door-to-needle time": a critical window for saving a life, is stretched far beyond safe limits. A patient having a heart attack waits an average of 74 minutes for the first medication, far exceeding the international standard of 30-45 minutes. For pneumonia, the wait stretches to 2 hours. One can only imagine the delays a woman suffering a postpartum hemorrhage or an obstetric emergency faces in this same system.
Behind these numbers is a deeper loss. The ENH notes that the shortage is not a temporary blip but a "failure at the level of authorities and decision-makers". The system, especially in states far from the capital, is not just broken; it is absent.
This is why THE CORD is taking a different path.
Before we build walls, we are building relationships. The answers to Venezuela's maternal health crisis already exist not in top-down models that have failed, but in native communities who remember the herbs that ease labor, in midwives who have quietly attended births for decades, in community-led initiatives across neighboring countries and global networks practicing ancestral and modern care.
Our work is to gather them. To listen. To learn. And to let that collective wisdom guide every woman involved toward a model of care the system can no longer provide.
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