Goal Selected: SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 3

Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

Fundación Colibrí and Programa de Ayuda Humanitaria para Venezuela have one mission, to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages in Venezuela.

Situation: Many are aware of the Humanitarian Crisis in Venezuela, especially in Colombia, its neighboring country, which has seen the problem up close and knows that this situation threatens the lives of many children, women, elderly and people with chronic diseases by not finding medicines, food or medical supplies for hospitals.

Brief:To help, several nonprofit organizations in Colombia have been responsible for rising and sending aid to Venezuela. After the prohibition of the regime of Nicolas Maduro against them, this much-needed aid has been dammed at the border, accumulating tons of medicines and medical supplies that could have saved thousands of lives.

With borders closed and no diplomatic advances in sight, Colombia's dark past had to come to the rescue.

Challenge: Making donations go unnoticed across the Colombia-Venezuela border.

Objective: Help NGOs to deliver Humanitarian Aid to the most vulnerable populations in Venezuela

Venezuela is experiencing a democratic crisis. There are two governments, for the interim government, represented by the only democratically elected faction of the state, the National Assembly, supported by 54 nations of the world, this initiative is legal.

For the other, the Nicolas Maduro's Regime, it is not.

This campaign is a courageous and conjunctural effort by a coalition of several NGOs and foundations in Colombia and Venezuela, to encourage people to volunteer and donate for those who cannot wait for a diplomatic or political solution to the Humanitarian Crisis in Venezuela.

The Good Drug Trafficking is an alternative service that uses the expertise of former Drug dealers, to deliver medicines and health supplies from Colombia to Venezuela.

This time we used Colombia’s dark past of smuggling goods through the Venezuelan border for good, creating direct ideas for volunteers and coaching NGOs to create travel items as decoys that can hide Humanitarian Aid, to save the lives of Venezuelans that cannot wait for a diplomatic solution to the country’s crisis.

Approach: The agency, in partnership with former smugglers and former traffickers, foundations and civil society, came together to ensure that medicines continue to reach Venezuelan families in greatest need.

Target audience: ONGs and Volunteers. The Good Drug Trafficking is an initiative that gives donations collected in Colombia to foundations in Venezuela, through volunteers who are advised by the same people who have passed all kinds of other drugs across the border in past decades; this time using their experience to do good.

It is an alternative to help all people who cannot wait months for a diplomatic solution to a crisis that has already killed thousands of children, youth, women and men with chronic and treatable diseases.

Call To Action: Do the unthinkable to help save a live.

Implementation: In May 2018, this initiative was launched as a way to help a small foundation in Caracas receive a shipment of four boxes of donations collected in Bogotá.

Timeline: As the tension with Venezuela has been progressively worsening, the needs of this strategy has been necessary for:

Scale:

- Design about 80 travel items, among suitcases, bags and clothing with imperceptible compartments, to avoid the seizure of medicines and medical supplies by border controls.

- Tracing land routes based on the same routes previously used for smuggling from Colombia to Venezuela.

- Generate decoys on social media such as fake news, sightings of drones passing donations across the border, or videos from the jungle showing the passage of donations.

- Call a large volunteer movement of citizens who want to help, contacting Foundations and NGOs via Whatsapp with donations ready to be sent to Venezuela.

At the time of writing this piece, the arrival of 100% of the shipments has been registered, these are more than 30 tons of Humanitarian Aid valued at more than COP$9,000,000,000 pesos (USD$3,000,000), reaching a coalition of 12 NGOs, foundations and churches protected under the fictitious name of "Foundations United for Venezuela", created to generate a voice over the Venezuelan reality.

Approximately 180,000 medicines crossed the border this way, mostly retrovirals, insulins, antihypertensives, anticonvulsants, antibiotics, antiallergic treatments, and medical supplies for the population whose life is at risk.

There is still so much to do; the scarcity of medicines, the high cost of treatments, and the deficit of equipment and supplies in hospitals, not to mention the temporary absence of energy and drinking water throughout Venezuela, increasingly compromise the dignity and human rights of Venezuela's population.