B’atz Local Institutional Strengthening Project

The B’atz Local Institutional Strengthening Project seeks to strengthen USAID’s engagement with Indigenous Peoples and local communities by supporting their development priorities and fostering an enabling environment to advocate for their rights and develop tools to advance their development priorities.

The project—in partnership with Rainforest Foundation US—will consolidate the regional structures of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (Alliance), which provides important services for its membership, including political advocacy to position its members’ needs and demands through channeling financing,  provision of organizational technical assistance,  providing timely information on regional political and economic processes, coordinating regional and international representation, engaging and dialoguing with the public sector, supporting  legal cases and defense of leaders, coordinating communication campaigns and the exchange of knowledge and experiences on a wide range of topics.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC APPROACH

The B’atz project activities focus on Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras. The main target audiences for the project include Indigenous and community leaders, women, and youth.

One regional structure of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests being supported by B’atz is the Mesoamerican Coordination of Territorial Women’s Leaders, which seeks to strengthen the capacity of the Women’s Coordination to work with and provide support to women leaders across the Alliance’s base organizations. This includes helping to develop a regional women’s agenda addressing issues of gender and climate change and mainstreaming that agenda across the Alliance as a whole.

Additionally, the B’atz project supports the geographical and thematic expansion of the Alliance’s Mesoamerican Leadership School. This expansion will be achieved through a series of training and strengthening activities in disaster risk management, emergency responses, and action planning aimed at youth, women, Indigenous and local communities’ members, including the community forestry association Utz Che’ in Guatemala, the network of community forestry organizations in Mexico, and the federation of agroforestry producers in Honduras.

CONTEXT AND CHALLENGES

In Mesoamerica today, Indigenous Peoples and local communities for the most part continue to be excluded from the benefits of economic growth. This results in the deepening of poverty and extreme poverty, and lack of access to basic education, health, water and sanitation services, roads, communication, and productive infrastructure, as well as access to information, credit, and markets that would allow sustainable development. Poverty and exclusion are also a main causal factor underlying northward migration, which in turn undermines the social fabric and community cohesion.

Indigenous Peoples and local communities are also among those most impacted by the effects of climate change. This impact on Indigenous Peoples and local communities is only expected to increase with the greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and storms, and other events including pandemics, disease vectors, floods, landslides, and droughts.

The Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests was founded ten years ago to make the many successful models of community management of natural resources more visible to domestic and international audiences, and to influence governments and regional bodies that make decisions on issues that affect communities.

APPROACH AND RESULTS

The B’atz project is strengthening the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests and its regional structures, resulting in:

• The institutionalization of the Alliance, including support for a General Assembly, approval of new Alliance bylaws, the establishment of the Alliance as a legal entity in Panamá, and the election of the Alliance’s internal governance structure (the legal representative, a new board of directors, and the coordinator of the technical secretariat). The nine members of the Alliance’s board of directors represent five Indigenous organizations and four local community organizations in the region; of those nine board members, three are women.
• The first Summit of Women Territorial Leaders of Mesoamerica, which saw the participation of 16 women leaders from nine Indigenous organizations and local communities coming from five Mesoamerican countries. As a result of this summit, the participants outlined a Regional Plan on Gender and Climate Change to promote climate justice and advocate for equal access to opportunities.

• The support of continued consolidation of the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, a financial mechanism of the Alliance that will be managed directly by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to serve as a flow through for international financing to directly reach communities in the territories to support their efforts to conserve and protect their forests in Mesoamerica.