With the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities and Wiñak, we are supporting the development of an Indigenous Peoples-led mechanism designed to build local, national and global partnerships with governments, businesses and investors to strengthen and scale up Indigenous Peoples-led rural enterprises, investments and initiatives.
In indigenous territories, due to their weak integration in markets and the low prices obtained, traditional agriculture, despite its high regenerative potential, does not represent a real economic opportunity for women and youth. There is a need to support indigenous economic organisations and rural enterprises in tropical forest territories to grow and multiply, creating more economic opportunities whilst ensuring land remains sustainably managed.
Through local and global outreach and advocacy it will help create policies, investments and markets that directly align with values of Indigenous Peoples and their conservation goals, thereby supporting the indigenous economy through strengthening livelihoods and creating jobs.
The platform will help build partnerships with the private sector around enterprises and investment such as Indigenous-led and managed bioeconomy enterprises, joint venture partnerships, carbon and biodiversity credits, corporate social responsibility actions.
It will also help develop long term agreements around intellectual property (e.g. on Digital Sequence Information (DSI)), relationship assessment (e.g. adherence to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC)) as well as natural resource and mineral extraction.
The initiative is still in developmental stage and will focus in the short term in the Amazon region with the following processes.
Stakeholder engagement with indigenous leaders to understand the demand for, and types of, services a chamber of commerce could provide and with indigenous economic organisations to understand the current state of, and future opportunities for, an indigenous economy.
Identifying sources of funding to further strengthen the concept through knowledge exchange and learning between indigenous groups from tropical forests, and economic organisations in the Global North.
A prototype of an Indigenous Chamber of Commerce will see the light out of this process.
