14 / 114
[
] 12
Tomorrow’s strong leaders:
a school for indigenous women
Valeria Poggi, Emma Jessie McGhie, and Yon Fernandez de Larrinoa,
Indigenous Peoples Team, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
F
ull and effective participation at different levels of
decision-making remains an issue to many women
around the world. This is even more problematic for
indigenous women, who often suffer from discrimination,
lack of recognition of basic human rights, and exclusion
from decision-making. However, indigenous women, with
their wealth of traditional knowledge, can play a critical
role within their communities and in the overall achieve-
ment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
To overcome these constraints and support tomorrow’s
indigenous women leaders, the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International
Indigenous Women’s Forum (IIWF) partnered to train more
than 150 indigenous women from seven countries in Asia and
Latin America to provide them with the necessary tools to
develop leadership and advocacy skills, thus enabling them
to influence decision-making processes and contribute to
improving their communities’ livelihoods.
It is estimated that there are more than 370 million indig-
enous peoples around the globe belonging to more than
5,000 different groups and living in 90 countries. Over the
centuries, their cosmogony and holistic understanding of
natural processes played a key role in establishing a unique
balance between nature and human beings. This helped
preserve forests, lakes, rivers and other natural resources
that today constitute the remaining pockets of biodiversity.
In this process, indigenous peoples became the custodians
of their ancestral lands and territories and transmitted from
one generation to another fundamental knowledge on ecosys-
tem management and preservation, as well as traditional food
systems and healthy and sustainable diets.
While indigenous peoples account for less than 5 per cent
of the global population, they comprise about 15 per cent of
all the world’s poor. What makes them highly vulnerable and
marginalized is the denial of their ancestral rights, especially
in the access to their land, territories and resources.
In addition, indigenous women face a ‘triple discrimination’
because of their ethnicity, socioeconomic conditions and gender.
This threefold discrimination affects all aspects of their lives,
making them victims of inequalities and violence both inside and
outside their communities. Indigenous women are frequently
prevented from taking an active role in political activities and
participating in decision-making processes. This limits the
contributions that they could provide to their communities and
to the societies they live in, particularly regarding food produc-
tion, biodiversity conservation and seed preservation.
Moreover, technical assistance and development activities
are usually not conceived to target indigenous peoples, being
culturally inappropriate and failing to reach remote commu-
nities. When they do, they tend to benefit indigenous men,
leaving women outside. This further exacerbates indigenous
women’s vulnerabilities, perpetrating marginalization.
Taking into account that indigenous women are bearers of
traditions and carers of families, and with the objective of enhanc-
ing their contribution towards the eradication of hunger and
extreme poverty for all, FAO and IIWF have developed a learn-
ing approach that focuses on indigenous women and is tailored
to their needs, featuring human rights, advocacy, leadership and
decision-making, and food security and nutrition. “Women are
the main providers of food in the household not only in terms of
preparing it but also in sowing, planting and harvesting it. But it
is still the men who decide what food or crop should be planted
and harvested, what should be bought and sold in the market,”
said Darhmingliani Hloncheu, a Mizo woman from Meghalaya,
who participated in the programme in India.
In 2013, IIWF started implementing three International
Programs on Human Rights and Advocacy Skills through
the Global Indigenous Women Leadership School. Based on
the success generated by these programmes, in 2014 IIWF
and FAO partnered to adapt the global school methodol-
ogy to the national level, jointly developing four National
Leadership Programmes on Human Rights, Food Security
and Nutrition for indigenous women in Bolivia, India, Peru
and the Philippines. A year later, three additional programmes
started in El Salvador, Panama and Paraguay.
The direct support of FAO has allowed the school to focus
on food security and nutrition, which is particularly impor-
tant because, as declared by Judith Paucar from the Puno
province in Peru: “When we talk about women we need to
realize that women are vital on the production of food. It is
us who produce, who prepare the food and feed our families.
We are convinced that in our houses we need to eat our own
foods. We indigenous peoples are not poor, on the contrary,
we are very rich because we have nature, and nature is alive.”
Through the engagement of its global team of technical
specialists, FAO has developed training material specifically
tailored to address the most common challenges that indig-
enous women face. The training material and the leadership
curriculum is constantly evolving, being enriched with best
A B
etter
W
orld