Community Empowerment Facility Profile

BACKGROUND

The lack of access to sufficiently-sized plots of land to permit households to make an adequate living, is a reason for poverty as well as a potential source of conflict. The situation is worsened for poor farmers in the Canton of Rio Pitzambitze, where families often try to squeeze a living from less than one hectare of degraded farmland with limited water supplies and shortages of agricultural inputs. A local NGO, the Union of Indigenous Farmers' Organizations of Cotacachi (UNORCAC) has been working with an Italian assisted NGO, UCODEP Movimondo, to help local communities surmount the obstacles to gaining secure access to land and water in order to improve their livelihoods.

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GOAL AND OBJECTIVES

The project goal is to work with the indigenous communities and their organizations to elaborate, negotiate and implement a natural resource management plan based on a clear understanding of their rights and ability to negotiate. The aim is to resolve existing land and water conflicts and train Water Users' Associations and other community groups in the technical and legal aspects needed to gain bargaining power and representation in local planning bodies such as the Assembly of the Canton of Cotacachi. Particular attention will be placed on women's groups since many women have become de facto heads of households due to rural out-migration.

The project aims to support and empower community groups, farmers' organizations and cooperatives that have suffered years of intimidation by powerful landowners, a situation that is mirrored elsewhere in Ecuador .

The process involves setting up local farmers' associations and creating an office to provide juridical services which will promote and support their representation on local committees to ensure their informed and effective voice is heard in local government. This will provide them with the ways and means to negotiate and participate in local government to defend their rights to land and water as well as access to basic goods and services.

Project Activities

A main reason for establishing an office of legal assistance is to identify cases of conflict concerning land and water rights. One example is the case of a local community group having access to 120 hectares of communal farmland but being denied the legal right to use it because the farmers lack titles. The project will negotiate the regularization processes. Similarly, the main local water supply, the Pitzambitze river, is now highly polluted as a result of waste from a large hotel, as well as the discharge from chicken production, an on-going situation despite national and local environmental laws. This not only affects the health of local residents but also reduces the productive capacity of the river.

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WHO WILL BENEFIT?

Eleven indigenous communities comprising 900 families in Pitzambitze will benefit directly from the services provided. On average, these local farmers have access to one hectare of farmland but do not have access to irrigation. Also, as a consequence of the significant increase in migration resulting from the deteriorating rural economy, women are becoming the main stakeholders in many of the indigenous communities in the Canton. Five women’s groups will be assisted through the women’s network of UNORCAC.

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CONCLUSION

The recurring costs of the juridical office will be met from a modest client fee and from related NGO activities which include revenues from an agroecological farm, fruit and native tree nursery, a leather wholesaler and an agency promoting tourism in the Cotacachi indigenous communities. As an increasing number of cases are taken up by the office, it is likely that other community groups will apply either for direct legal assistance, or, training in the process of legal representation. The project is tangible proof of the indigenous communities' efforts to alleviate their conflicts and reduce endemic poverty.

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