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Support the development of a community-led maternal care initiative in Maracaibo, weaving ancestral and traditional techniques.
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Visit the Cookie Policy page.Venezuela: 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 ENH found that in 91% of monitored hospitals, patients, mothers included, 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. 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".
This is why THE CORD is taking a different path.
Before we build walls, we must 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 traditional care.
Our work is to gather them and to let collective wisdom guide every woman involved toward a model of care the system can no longer provide.
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