Over 370 million indigenous peoples reside in additional than 70 nations the world over. Whereas they represent about 5 p.c of the world’s inhabitants, they account for roughly 15percent of the world’s poor. Such is the case with indigenous Mayangna ladies residing within the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve in northern Nicaragua, who face poverty, isolation, home violence and triple discrimination based mostly on their gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic scenario. The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) partnership, hosted by FAO, has supported Mayangna ladies to promote native merchandise and enhance their livelihoods. Capability constructing workshops have taught the ladies how you can enhance product high quality and geared up them with market information, whereas additionally serving to to protect their tradition. On the similar time, the FFF helps Mayangna ladies acquire social and financial empowerment by strengthening the place of girls’s producer organizations. This enhanced productive and organizational capability is giving hope to many ladies locally for a greater future.
Preserving tradition and bettering livelihoods
Telma Maria Rena Ramirez, a member of the Bonanza municipality of Mayangna Territory, belongs to a bunch of indigenous Mayangna ladies who work with the bark of the native tuno tree to make handicrafts, equivalent to baggage, folders and wallets. “It is a uncooked materials that our ancestors left which has wealthy worth for us,” Telma says. “Now, as Mayangna ladies, we’re beginning to obtain financial independence for our households by way of the merchandise we promote due to the tuno.”
By coaching, exchanges and steady teaching, FFF assist has helped Mayangna ladies enhance the standard of their merchandise, diversify markets and get higher costs. Some 40 Mayangna ladies and younger individuals from 10 forest and farm producer organizations attended a course on market evaluation and improvement. Native forests have all the time supplied the ladies with merchandise equivalent to fruits and fibres for their very own households. By selling tuno handicraft making as an earnings producing exercise, the FFF can be serving to to protect the Mayangna tradition.
Over 200 ladies are additionally diversifying their earnings by promoting and processing the fruit of the ramón or ojoche tree (Brosimum alicastrum). Because of a knowledge-sharing occasion with ladies’s producer teams from Guatemala and Honduras, the Mayangna ladies realized concerning the full potential of the ramón nut.
“We’ve got skilled many ladies who didn’t know concerning the Nuez de Ramón, or breadnut fruit,” says Benedicta Dionisio Ramirez from a ladies’s producer group in Guatemala. “However now they’ve the information and should not solely consuming it but additionally promoting it, together with on worldwide markets.”
Striving for social empowerment
Strengthening ladies’s management and shallowness has been an necessary a part of the capability improvement plan. In 2015, the FFF collaborated with the Mayangna Nation’s board of administrators and Mayangna ladies’s organizations to strengthen their engagement in coverage processes. Collectively they addressed points equivalent to meals safety, home violence, and the development of manufacturing programs.
Conferences had been additionally held in every Mayangna territory to debate methods to enhance the place of girls’s organizations. Rising inside unity and group had been recognized as priorities, as was the necessity to improve the participation of those ladies in public establishments and decision-making.
With FFF assist, 130 ladies from 9 territories attended the primary Discussion board of Mayangna Girls within the Autonomous Area of the North Caribbean Coast to strengthen ladies’s organizations within the respective territories. Consequently, the ladies established the Mayangna Nation Community of Girls.
Forest and Farm Facility
The FFF is a partnership, launched in September 2012, between FAO, the Worldwide Institute for Surroundings and Growth (IIED), the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature and Pure Sources (IUCN), and AgriCord. It’s guided by a steering committee of members affiliated with forest producer, group forestry and indigenous peoples’ organizations, the worldwide analysis group, enterprise improvement service supplier organizations, the non-public sector, authorities, and donors. Present donors embody Finland, Germany, Sweden, america and AgriCord.
