Model and Strategy
For indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon keeping their rainforests standing is a life and death challenge. They must be able to defend their newly-won land rights against outside threats from industrial logging and wildcat gold mining, but that’s not enough. It is key to manage the forests sustainably and collectively, and build profitable local enterprises based on these precious resources. Communities are already practicing very low impact timber management, Brazil nut harvesting, shade grown coffee, cocoa, and ecotourism, but they do not have the tools to build successful enterprises.
The Rainforest Alliance puts technology to work with the communities to catalyze sustainable livelihoods. Community leaders in the Peruvian Amazon have asked us to adapt our "Farmer App", initially developed for agriculture communities, to help address challenges they are having in scaling up their efforts. Working together, the project will deploy user-centered design with communities to build, test, iterate and deploy a new tool that will help transform livelihoods, combined with supporting their ongoing fight to defend their rights and to build sustainable forest-based enterprises.
Impact
The impacts of this work are enormous given the incredible biological richness of the forests and the human rights that will be defended. Over the next two years, we aim to achieve the following:
• Upscaled capacity for indigenous economic development within at least 21 national and regional indigenous federations.
• 40 indigenous businesses strengthened in community clusters laying a foundation for replication in others.
• $3 million mobilized in investment to indigenous enterprises through market alliances, new credit products, and innovative investment programs building on Rainforest Alliance’s long track record of success in this area.
The proposed project will enable the following important triggers to achieve the overall impact described above:
• Improved market access: providing key market intelligence otherwise not readily available to forest communities and offer training to strengthen their negotiation skills.
• Improved business skills: through easy-to-access digital support that respects indigenous traditions and supports the management of the business and collective administration
• Credit management: supporting the management of internal credit systems, through basic automated calculations of interest, payback, and other relevant metrics.
• Access to credit: the above two assets will enable the enterprises to digitize and organize the requirements needed to gain access to credit.
• Access to knowledge through peer to peer learning: communities will be able to easily exchange knowledge through user generated pictures and videos on the harvesting of non-timber forest products, how to add value to the products, how to identify markets, and other relevant content.
Leadership
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Nigel Sizer
Chief Program Officer